Notes

The artist spent five years in Paris from 1970 to 1975.

Two of the portraits that French artist Henri Matisse painted of his wife Amélie are in striking contrast to each other – the brightly coloured Fauvist work with a green stripe down the centre of the sitter’s face (1905), probably one of Matisse’s most well-known images, and the later portrait where the colours are relatively subdued and the face is a ghoulish grey mask with empty black eyes (1913). Thijs Nel chose the second of these for his own reinterpretation
of Madame Matisse in the present lot. Although the basic composition and colour palette follow Matisse’s original, Nel has fractured the picture surface with angular planes that physically jut out into the viewer’s space, recalling the synthetic cubism of Picasso and Braque that was the dominant avant-garde style in Paris at the time Matisse painted his portrait. Nel has always had a particular affinity for Matisse and his work, possibly because, as a child, he noticed that his own given name, Mathijs, was similar to the painter’s surname. He recalls: ‘When I started my creative endeavours, he became to me a guiding light, a mentor. It is said that good teaching is caught, not taught and somehow the spirit of Matisse, more than any other of the countless great artists, resonated within me. In 1989 during a period working in Paris, I visited an exhibition of drawings from the family’s private collection at the Musée Matisse at Le Cateau-Cambrésis. They had never been exhibited before and I was entirely overcome with emotion at seeing Matisse’s work in the museum he himself had established. The present lot, Bonjour! Mme Matisse, was done some years later back in South Africa but is still, I hope, infused with a sense of Matisse and his work in Paris in the early twentieth century.’