A proof of Seated Nude Asleep was shown in Paris at the Salon des Indépendants in 1907. Reviewing the exhibition, a friend of the artist complained of the work's "willful deformations, a bit too premeditated." More than forty years later the great Matisse scholar Alfred H. Barr praised this work as presenting a "figure more uncompromising in its distortions and angularities than The Blue Nude (1907)," the artist's boldest Fauve painting. Even today the printed image has lost little of its original impact.

This is the largest and best known of three woodcuts of reclining or seated nudes that Matisse created in 1906. These prints—his only attempts in the medium—are indeed black-on-white equivalents of his strongest Fauve pictures. Matisse did not attempt to invest the nude with sensuous appeal. Instead, he concentrated on simplification and design. The contorted body rests on a background that is also Fauve in its combination of dots, daubs, and straight and wavy lines.

Woodcut was in vogue among the artist's colleagues in France and Germany. While the latter gouged directly into the block, Matisse created studies for his prints. The ink drawing for this work was recently acquired by the Metropolitan as part of the Jacques and Natasha Gelman bequest (acc. no. 1999.363.39). The block is owned by the British Museum, London.