Potrait d'homme de profil (Roger Bernard), 1946 Charcoal © 2010 Succession H. Matisse / Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York courtesy, NYU website / press release

By Mackie Healy, Art Market Views Contributor

The first exhibition devoted to Henri Matisse’s drawings of men opened this week at NYU’s Maison Française.

Several works in Henri Matisse – Writers on Paper: Selected Drawings and Prints from the Pierre and Tana Matisse Foundation are being shown for the first time.

Though better known for the female form, the show’s 1937-1946 prints and drawings chronicle the male writers who were part of Matisse’s world.

The show includes seven large pen-and-ink portraits of French Surrealist poet, and zealous Matisse biographer, Louis Aragon. Other drawings and lithographs portray novelist Henri de Montherlant, dramatist Paul Léautaud, and Matisse’s reclusive neighbor, Franz Thomassin, a writer who published under the pseudonym Franz Viller.

The show, curated by Martin Fisher and Martin Mullin, will be on view from Nov. 2 to Dec. 21. La Maison Française, located on the cobblestoned Washington Mews in Greenwich Village, is NYU’s French cultural center. The gallery is open Monday through Friday 10am – 6pm.