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Lot Essay
Wanda de Guébriant has confirmed the authenticity of this work.
Orientalism had its heyday in painting during the latter part of the 19th century and in the years before the First World War, when Western colonialist expansion was at its height. In the hands of its practitioners, academicians mostly, Orientalism was essentially a conservative style that was illustrative in intent and anecdotal in content. With the ascendancy of modernism, the rift widened between the avowedly progressive painters of the new avant-garde and the larger body of conservative artists who populated the academies and sought their success in official and conventional venues. After the advent of Fauvism and Cubism, and the development of non-objective art, a truly modern painter could not regard contemporary Orientalist painting without expressing his disdain for its old-fashioned style and often sentimentalized content, all of which seemed hopelessly out-of-step with the time.
Nevertheless, Orientalist themes, with their implicit exoticism, as well as opportunities for lush color and sinuous line, held Matisse under an enduring spell. His visits to Spain and North Africa in the years before 1914 had fed his imagination with a wealth of vivid new subjects, many of which found immediate fruit in masterpieces sold through Bernheim-Jeune to Ivan Morosov and Sergei Shchukin, his major pre-war Russian patrons.
From the 1920s onward, following his move to the Mediterranean coast, Oriental motifs became central to Matisse's repertoire and the subject of some of his most celebrated works. In the present painting, the model wears an elegant striped gandoura which appears to be identical to the robe depicted in Femme sur un canapé rouge, and in the drawing La Gandoura (figs. 1-2).
The importance of Orientalism was deeply personal: Matisse, as the greatest colorist in modern art, revered Eugene Delacroix, the heroic colorist of the nineteenth-century whose Les femmes d'Alger of 1834 in the Louvre, a famous celebration of the odalisque motif, was seen as a central work of the early modern canon. Both Delacroix's freedom with color and his Orientalist subject matter were enormously influential for Matisse. Françoise Gilot, writing in 1964, states: “[Matisse] has always been a frequent visitor to the Louvre, where he had copied the masters during his early years of soul searching...He went back to the large galleries where Delacroix's major works were displayed [including] Les femmes d'Alger... Matisse studied Delacroix's achievements, from the rhythmical arabesques of his compositions to his bold color contrasts, with passion” (Life with Picasso, New York, 1964, p. 169).
Matisses's inheritance of sensual Orientalism and lyricism lent his art an accessibility, a generous inclusiveness that enthralls onlookers and eradicates the arguments of opposing camps in admiration of his painterly skill. Picasso, for one, who shared Matisse's sense of wonder in front of Delacroix, and who went on to pay his own artistic homage to Les femmes d'Alger in the 1950s, stated that: “There are a number of things I shall no longer be able to talk about with anyone after Matisse's death,” and “All things considered, there is only Matisse” (quoted in ibid., p. 316).
Orientalism had its heyday in painting during the latter part of the 19th century and in the years before the First World War, when Western colonialist expansion was at its height. In the hands of its practitioners, academicians mostly, Orientalism was essentially a conservative style that was illustrative in intent and anecdotal in content. With the ascendancy of modernism, the rift widened between the avowedly progressive painters of the new avant-garde and the larger body of conservative artists who populated the academies and sought their success in official and conventional venues. After the advent of Fauvism and Cubism, and the development of non-objective art, a truly modern painter could not regard contemporary Orientalist painting without expressing his disdain for its old-fashioned style and often sentimentalized content, all of which seemed hopelessly out-of-step with the time.
Nevertheless, Orientalist themes, with their implicit exoticism, as well as opportunities for lush color and sinuous line, held Matisse under an enduring spell. His visits to Spain and North Africa in the years before 1914 had fed his imagination with a wealth of vivid new subjects, many of which found immediate fruit in masterpieces sold through Bernheim-Jeune to Ivan Morosov and Sergei Shchukin, his major pre-war Russian patrons.
From the 1920s onward, following his move to the Mediterranean coast, Oriental motifs became central to Matisse's repertoire and the subject of some of his most celebrated works. In the present painting, the model wears an elegant striped gandoura which appears to be identical to the robe depicted in Femme sur un canapé rouge, and in the drawing La Gandoura (figs. 1-2).
The importance of Orientalism was deeply personal: Matisse, as the greatest colorist in modern art, revered Eugene Delacroix, the heroic colorist of the nineteenth-century whose Les femmes d'Alger of 1834 in the Louvre, a famous celebration of the odalisque motif, was seen as a central work of the early modern canon. Both Delacroix's freedom with color and his Orientalist subject matter were enormously influential for Matisse. Françoise Gilot, writing in 1964, states: “[Matisse] has always been a frequent visitor to the Louvre, where he had copied the masters during his early years of soul searching...He went back to the large galleries where Delacroix's major works were displayed [including] Les femmes d'Alger... Matisse studied Delacroix's achievements, from the rhythmical arabesques of his compositions to his bold color contrasts, with passion” (Life with Picasso, New York, 1964, p. 169).
Matisses's inheritance of sensual Orientalism and lyricism lent his art an accessibility, a generous inclusiveness that enthralls onlookers and eradicates the arguments of opposing camps in admiration of his painterly skill. Picasso, for one, who shared Matisse's sense of wonder in front of Delacroix, and who went on to pay his own artistic homage to Les femmes d'Alger in the 1950s, stated that: “There are a number of things I shall no longer be able to talk about with anyone after Matisse's death,” and “All things considered, there is only Matisse” (quoted in ibid., p. 316).