Matisse

Matisse's first sculptures were created during his student years. These artists shared a fascination with the tonal dynamics of Post-Impressionism; their vivid compositions increasingly gave color an emotive, independent, and antinaturalistic role. " By 1909 Matisse shifted to a more serene style in paintings, executed with broad color planes, simplified structures, and idyllic subjects.

The Backs are Matisse's most radical works in bronze. Not surprisingly, his earliest figures were copies after small-scale academic bronzes. Over the next decade Matisse created a number of female nudes, variously rendered as standing and reclining figures, which reveal his careful study of the model. The four panels were executed over a twenty-year span, with each successive image reworked from a plaster cast of the preceding one. By 1900 Matisse had begun more ambitious compositions. In the succession of works, the figure is progressively straightened and the axis of the spine becomes the increasing focus of the composition. They exhibited together at the 1905 and 1906 Salon d'Automne, where their paintings created a sensation, leading one critic to refer to them as "Les Fauves" or "wild beasts. By turning the figure away from the viewer, Matisse explores the challenge of endowing the human form with expressive power. r the great Symbolist painter Gustave Moreau. The figure, shown from the back, is executed in high relief against a framing ground, a painterly device with few precedents in sculpture.