Nu gris au bracelet

Around 1913 Matisse was painting some of the most stripped-down pictures of his life. He had just come back from two winters in Morocco, and in Paris the young Cubists were pulling art toward hard edges and muted colour. Matisse felt that pull, and it took him a long way from the hot, joyful colour he is usually remembered for. Here a reclining nude is built from soft grey tones and a few searching lines, the body pared back to its essentials, with only the small gold gleam of a bracelet to break the restraint. He scraped the surface down and reworked it many times, hunting for the pose rather than fixing it in one go. The bare grey ground he left around her is part of the picture.