Henri Manguin (1874 - 1949) — Woman Sleeping On A Cushion, 1923

Woman Sleeping on a Cushion, 1923
India ink on paper, signature stamp lower right.
24,7 x 33,4 cm

Provenance:
Private collection, France

Certificate of authenticity issued by Mme Claude Holstein Manguin.

Henri Manguin, the pacified Fauve

Henri Manguin was one of the early Fauves, represented in the outrageous room of the 1905 Salon d'Automne by five of his paintings, whose evocative titles foreshadow themes that would occupy him throughout his life. La Sieste (TheNap), Sur le balcon (On the Balcony), Sous les arbres (Under the Trees), Les chênes lièges (The Cork Oaks) and Le pré (The Meadow) are all promises of a landscape that is omnipresent in a body of work that does not neglect the representation of humans. What is immediately striking in Manguin's paintings is his way of treating the outdoors as if it were indoors. More precisely, without detracting from the wildness that characterizes the landscapes he depicts, the painter allows his models to evolve more comfortably than in any interior. The boundary between inside and outside thus disappears in his art in the simplest and most skillful way possible.
He owes this possibility of a door constantly open to the landscape to the mild climate of the South of France, or more precisely to the skies of Saint-Tropez, where, after staying there for the first time in 1904, he settled from May to October the following year at Villa Demière with his wife Jeanne and their children. His friend Albert Marquet joined him there.In Manguin's paintings, the landscape appears lush, even primitive, but never wild. It is intended to be a reassuring evocation of a rediscovered Eden, which at that time was a recurring theme for many painters, such as Henri Matisse, Pierre Bonnard, Paul Signac, Edmond Cross, and others. We can also see, particularly through the attachment he reveals for his models, the fullness of marital and family happiness. The difficulty for the master, throughout his research, was to “harmonize.” Not only to harmonize bodies with nature, but also to harmonize the rendering of pictorial expression with the emotions felt. Finally, he sought to harmonize the colors on the canvas. He did not seek this balance in tones according to academic precepts, but according to personal and innovative concepts, which did not exclude the juxtaposition of certain stridencies. These were gradually attenuated by the increasingly frequent use of areas of violet, which he assigned the role of binding agent in the composition. As with his peers, whose convictions had been forged in Gustave Moreau's studio a few years earlier, contrasting tones were the order of the day. Each artist, in their own way, assigned a new role to color. In Manguin's work, the rigor of construction borrowed from Cézanne (whose 1895 retrospective at Vollard's had made a great impression on him) is combined with the use of bold colors and a simplificationof forms that never goes so far as to distort them. These elements servecompositions that give pride of place to the artist's sensitive view of the world. Manguin's painting is more emotional than intellectual in nature. Few writings, apart from correspondence with his painter friends, bear witness to the artist's reflections on his journey, which was much more instinctive than spiritual. The emotion born of observing nature, where the flesh of the models melts away, seems to govern what the artist projects onto the canvas.
By 1906, he was already enjoying success with dealers and collectors. Ambroise Vollard bought 142 paintings from him that year, as well as pastels and drawings, while the following year, Bernheim-Jeune acquired a collection of paintings and drawings and the Druet gallery offered him a solo exhibition. Manguin traveled: with Henri Matisse he discovered Collioure, and with Albert Marquet, Italy.
From the 1910s onwards, he regularly visited Switzerland, where he became close to a famous couple of collectors who particularly appreciated his work, the Hahnloser-Bühler family. He spent his life with his family, between Paris and the South of France, where he felt at home and enjoyed working, in Saint-Tropez and Sanary. After the Fauve movement, he left the avant-garde for a more nuanced aesthetic. He kept his distance from the emerging trends and continued his research on the fringes of Parisian artistic life, with a consistency that did not exclude constantly renewed emotion. Despite this relative distance, dealers and collectors continued to champion his work, and the artist remained in contact with his painter friends, especially Albert Marquet, with whom he maintained a lifelong relationship of sincere affection and artistic emulation.

Discover more of this artist's works on the gallery's website: https://www.galeriepentcheff.fr/fr/peintre-henri-manguin#Oeuvres