The four Blue Nudes (1952) are among the most commanding achievements of Matisse's final period, made when he was eighty-two years old and had been working almost exclusively in the cut-out technique for a decade. The figures are composed entirely from shapes cut from paper painted in a single shade of cerulean blue — the cutting and arranging serving simultaneously as drawing and painting, the process by which Matisse arrived at forms that could not have been achieved by any other means. The Blue Nudes were not made as a series but as independent explorations of the same problem: how to render the human figure through cut colour alone, stripping away everything that conventional representation would regard as necessary.
Blue Nude II shows a seated female figure in a pose that reconfigures bodily weight and volume into something simultaneously anatomical and abstract — the body understood as a set of planar relationships rather than as a described surface. The version reproduced here is the colour lithograph published in Verve, Volume IX, Numbers 35–36 (Dernières Oeuvres de Matisse 1950–54), 1958, which disseminated the cut-outs to an international audience after Matisse's death. The lithograph measures 36.5 × 27 cm and is now in the public domain.
Fine Porcelain — 10 oz. Dishwasher and microwave safe.
Henri Matisse, Blue Nude II, 1952; colour lithograph published in Verve, vol. IX, nos. 35–36, 1958. Public domain.
