A blue paper nude arches and reaches across bright yellow

Deep blue cut-paper shapes lie on a bright yellow ground, forming an abstracted reclining figure: two curved bands arch upward like raised arms around three round forms suggesting a head and shoulders, above a long tapering shape that bends into an angular leg ending in a small zigzag foot at lower left. Two separate four-pronged leaf shapes are pasted in the upper-left and lower-left corners, with faint vertical seams where sheets of yellow paper join. The monogram "HM" is inked at lower right; Matisse made this cut-paper gouache in 1952.

Henri Matisse (1869–1954) was a French painter, draughtsman, printmaker and sculptor, and with Picasso one of the two artists who defined modern painting in the first half of the twentieth century. He came to prominence in 1905 as the leader of the Fauves, whose canvases of that summer at Collioure used unmixed colour as the structure of the picture rather than its decoration. From 1917 he worked mainly in Nice, painting interiors, windows and models in patterned rooms with a lighter touch, and from the 1940s, confined largely to bed after surgery, he invented the papiers découpés — compositions cut from gouache-painted paper, published in the book Jazz (1947) and culminating in the Blue Nudes and the large wall-scale cut-outs of his last years. His work is held by the Musée National d'Art Moderne in Paris, the Museum of Modern Art in New York, the Hermitage and the Barnes Foundation among many others.

Printed as a museum-grade giclée on Hahnemühle fine art paper using 12-ink archival pigment printing. Available handframed in FSC-certified wood with optional float glass, or unframed. Ships worldwide with free delivery to 30+ countries.