Recent acquisition: Girl in Rumanian Blouse

The Carl Heidenreich Foundation is pleased to share the recent acquisition of Heidenreich’s Girl in Rumanian Blouse, purchased from the painter’s grandson Howard Lortz.

Gabriele Saure writes about the painting in her 2004 monograph on Carl Heidenreich:

“The works [Heidenreich] produced in his first years in the United States—still lifes, interiors, and street scenes—make no attempt to conceal their European roots. They contain many allusions to Henri Matisse and Raoul Dufy. Matisse’s influence is particularly evident in the early portraits produced in the United States… Nowhere in his work is the mark of the European tradition quite as strong as in a female portrait that Heidenreich produced shortly after his arrival in New York, at the beginning of the 1940s. The reference to Matisse’s Girl in Rumanian Blouse is unmistakable; in it he expresses with uncommon candor an admiration for the Frenchman.”

By the 1940s, Matisse had included the patterns from blouses and other traditional clothing in his paintings for at least a decade. Perhaps the closest parallel to Heidenreich’s painting is a work Matisse finished in 1940, La Blouse Roumaine (see right). For Matisse, the image of woman in a patterned blouse is flattened into a two-dimensional plane of unmuddied color and vivid patterning. Heidenreich’s Girl in Rumanian Blouse, by comparison, is a loose, delicate rendering of the subject. The patterning of the blouse is carried over in Heidenreich’s painting to the ruffled stitching along the shoulder and neckline, while the bold blocks of color and pattern in Matisse’s become dissolved in a wash of diluted blues, reds, and greens. The expression of the face is made more naturalistic, while the flattened background is filled with nuances, brushstrokes, and crosshatching. While paying homage to the work of his well-known contemporary, Heidenreich’s painting thus uniquely inserts itself within the language of both European painting and traditional European garments.

Henri Matisse, La Blouse Roumaine, 1940.