Oil on canvas
Not on view
Matisse took Woman on a High Stool (Germaine Raynal) through many changes as he worked, particularly the seated figure. Perhaps the greatest alteration was in color: vivid blue, green, and orange-red areas have been mostly covered with layers of gray. The painting shares its simplified geometric forms, heavy contouring, and austere palette with the work of Paul Cézanne and the Cubist paintings Pablo Picasso and Georges Braque made a few years earlier.
2011.
Gallery label from Matisse: Radical Invention, 1913-1917 , July 18–October 11, 2010.
Matisse took Woman on a High Stool through many changes as he worked, particularly the seated figure. Perhaps the greatest alteration was in color: vivid blue, green, and orange-red areas have been mostly covered with layers of gray. Here, as in his earlier blue paintings, the artist may have embraced a restriction of color for the formal and expressive potential it presented. The painting shares its simplified geometric forms, heavy contouring, and austere palette with the work of Cézanne and Cubist paintings Picasso and Georges Braque made a few years earlier. This work represents Germaine Raynal, wife of the Cubist critic Maurice Raynal.
Provenance Research Project
This work is included in the Provenance Research Project, which investigates the ownership history of works in MoMA's collection.
Reserved for Sergei Shchukin, 1914, but never delivered to Moscow because of outbreak of WWI
The artist, 1914 - 1954
Artist's estate / Madame Amélie Matisse, 1954 - 1958
Purchased from Amélie Matisse through Contemporary Art Establishment, Vaduz, Liechtenstein / Heinz Berggruen, Zurich, by Mr. and Mrs. Samuel A. Marx, Chicago; then Florene May Schoenborn (Samuel A. Marx's widow, later Mrs. Wolfgang Schoenborn). March 1958 (promised gift to MoMA in 1958) - 1964
The Museum of Modern Art, New York. Gift and bequest of Florene M. Schoenborn and Samuel A. Marx, 1964
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Henri Matisse
French, 1869–1954 428 works onlineThroughout his decades-long career as a painter, sculptor, draftsman, and printmaker, Henri Matisse continuously searched, in his own words, “for the same things, which I have perhaps realized by different means.
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