Matisse has long been celebrated as one of the 20th century's greatest printmakers, creating more than 800 separate etchings, lithographs, woodcuts and linocuts during the course of his career. He produced most of his prints during concentrated bursts of activity, at intervals, which makes them a fabulous lens through which to examine his development as an artist.
Le Grand Nu is one of the most important prints he ever made. Up until this point Matisse had produced transfer lithographs, which involved sketching the image on paper before transferring it onto a lithographic stone. This piece marks the very first time that he drew directly onto the stone itself.
The print is notable for its proto-cubist treatment of the human figure. It expresses vividly the importance of Paul Cezanne upon Matisse's development, particularly Cezanne’s ability to reduce objects to their simplest essence using the cone, sphere and cylinder. As a struggling artist in 1899, Matisse had purchased a painting by his idol that depicted three bathers in a landscape. He kept it for more than thirty years and its influence upon Le Grand Nu is clear to see.
Matisse's lithographs are generally known for their linear, economical style, but the modelling and broad shading used in Le Grand Nu connect it closely with his technique as a painter and sculptor. The image has been repeatedly scraped down, reworked and adjusted; at times the figure seems to have been carved out of the lithographic stone. Matisse is reducing, abstracting and building form all at once.
Le Grand Nu is closely related to a major painting that occupied Matisse for nearly a decade. He thought of Bathers by a River - housed in the Art Institute of Chicago - as one of the five pivotal works of his career. Beginning as an idyllic pastel-tinted landscape in 1909, it slowly evolved into a sober, cubist painting in blacks and greys, featuring models with sculptural bodies and faceless, ovoid heads. The woman in Le Grand Nu is the forerunner of these later figures.
It relates so closely in fact that some scholars have suggested Le Grand Nu may actually date from 1913, when Matisse radically altered the figures in Bathers by a River to the same style that we find in the lithograph.
The importance of Le Grand Nu has long been recognised and it is one of Matisse's most sought-after prints. It is held in the permanent collections of numerous international museums, with impressions from the small edition of 50 owned by the Museum of Fine Arts Boston, USA; Buffalo AKG Art Museum, USA; Art Institute of Chicago, USA; MoMA, New York, USA; Musée Matisse, Nice; Victoria & Albert Museum, London.
