Luxe, Calme et Volupté
|English: Luxury, Calm and Pleasure
||Oil on canvas
||98.5 cm × 118.5 cm (37 in × 46 in)
||Musée d'Orsay, Paris
Luxe, Calme et Volupté is an oil painting by the French artist Henri Matisse. It was painted in 1904, after a summer spent working in St. Tropez on the French Riviera alongside the neo-Impressionist painters Paul Signac and Henri-Edmond Cross. The painting is Matisse's most important work in which he used the Divisionist technique advocated by Signac, which Matisse had first adopted after reading Signac's essay "D'Eugène Delacroix au Néo-impressionisme" in 1898. Signac purchased the work, which was exhibited in 1905 at the Salon des Indépendants. Matisse abandoned the Divisionist technique the following year and became one of the pioneers of Fauvism.
The painting's title comes from the poem L'Invitation au voyage, from Charles Baudelaire's volume Les Fleurs du mal (The Flowers of Evil):
Là, tout n'est qu'ordre et beauté,
Luxe, calme et volupté.
There all is order and beauty,
Luxury, peace, and pleasure.
- ^ UCLA Art Council et al. 1966, p. 11
- ^ Oxford Art Online, "Henri Matisse"
- ^ Poem and translation on Fleursdumal.org The translation is from William Aggeler, The Flowers of Evil (Fresno, CA: Academy Library Guild, 1954)
- UCLA Art Council, Leymarie, J., Read, H. E., & Lieberman, W. S. (1966). Henri Matisse retrospective 1966. Los Angeles: UCLA Art Gallery. OCLC 83777407