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  • Henri Matisse
    Dec 31, 1869 - Nov 3, 1954
  • Woman in Oriental Costume - Henri Matisse was an artist often regarded as the most important French painter of the 20th century. He was the leader of the Fauvist movement about 1900, and he pursued the expressiveness of color throughout his career. His subjects were largely domestic or figurative, and a distinct Mediterranean verve presides in the treatment.
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Woman in Oriental Costume
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  • Woman in Oriental Costume

  • Henri Matisse
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  • Femme en costume oriental
    Painted in Nice in 1920
    Oil on board

    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. Fran?oise 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).

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Other paintings by Henri Matisse:

Woman in Armchair-Woman in Neglect
Woman in Armchair-Woman in Neglect
Still Lifes (Nature morte)
Still Lifes (Nature morte)
Small Corsican Landscape
Small Corsican Landscape
Naked by the Sea
Naked by the Sea
Henri MatisseHenri-Émile-Benoit Matisse was a French artist whose career spanned over six decades. He was influenced by Georges Seurat and Paul Signac, who painted in a “Pointillist” style with small dots of color rather than full brushstrokes. Matisse’s creativity came to the fore with sensational canvases such as, Luxe, calme et volupté, Open Window, and Woman with a Hat. Although he was initially labeled a Fauve (wild beast), he found his own style, and began to enjoy a greater degree of success. He travelled to travel to Italy, Germany, Spain and North Africa for inspiration. He signed a contract with the prestigious art dealers of Galerie Bernheim-Jeune in Paris. His art was purchased by prominent collectors such as Gertrude Stein and the Russian businessman Sergei I. Shchukin. In his later career, Matisse received several major commissions, such as a mural for the art gallery of collector Dr. Albert Barnes of Pennsylvania and for the Chapel of the Rosary in Venice. Although his subjects were traditional—nudes, figures in landscapes, portraits, interior views—his revolutionary use of brilliant color and exaggerated form to express emotion made him one of the most influential artists of the 20th century.