Olga Merson

In the summer of 1911 Matisse took his paints down to Collioure, on the Mediterranean coast, and set to work on one of his private students. Olga Merson was a Russian painter who had trained in Moscow and studied with Kandinsky in Munich before turning up at the small school Matisse ran in Paris. What holds your eye now are the two dark curved lines that cut straight across her hips and thigh. They are not clothing and not shadow. Matisse painted her face, neck and arm, scraped them back, and painted them again, and he left those heavy black arcs to lock the figure in place. You are looking at the record of the work itself, the decisions made and remade on the canvas. He and Merson were close, closer than teacher and pupil, and years later he still spoke warmly of her.