Matisse in Morocco

“I do not paint women. I paint pictures� replied Henri Matisse during the Fauvism craze in 1905 when he was asked about the way he painted women. Seven years later he would probably not make the same statement, given the stark changes in his depiction of women on canvas from sexual, primitive objects, as was the Fauve style in 1905, to civilized, respected subjects in Tanger, Morocco. Given the narrow-minded attitudes towards non-western cultures at the time, it is not unusual that his trip to Morocco would stimulate a drastic change in Matisse’s paintings of women, given that

indeed, every important step forward in Matisse’s painting took place in a specific corner of the world: he became an impressionist in Brittany, an adept of peinture Claire in Corsica, a proto-fauve in Toulouse, a divisionist in Saint- Tropez, a fauve in Collioure (Cowart et. al 30).

Understanding these trends in his career as Jack Cowart, co-author of the exhibition catalogue Matisse in Morocco, delineates them, it is reasonable to inquire why Morocco, far-removed from common European destinations with its exotic Islamic society, led Henri Matisse to change the way he painted the female figure. A single woman may be the answer to this paradox of the painted woman: why Matisse produced primitive depictions of women in the cultured West and civilized paintings of women in the unexplored Morocco. Here, Matisse discovered the woman Zorah, a prostitute he painted in her Moroccan dress and environment; she is prolific in his career because he painted her several times and never as a woman of the night, always as a respectable, though non-Western, woman. Thus instead of retreating to his primitive Fauve style of depicting women, Matisse left behind his untamed obsession with the females of a developed culture and opened a cultured perspective on the female of an undeveloped one. His paintings of Zorah provide the perfect arena in which to see that Matisse had moved far beyond Fauvism’s uncivilized passion for displaying women as a sensual sex. Thus although Pierre Schneider in his essay entitled “The Moroccan Hinge� from Matisse in Morocco, concludes that Matisse “did not repudiate Fauvism, but tried to expand it beyond its somewhat limited character� (Cowart et. al 34), Schneider is too quick to conclude that Matisse was merely broadening the technique of his previous style. Specifically, Matisse’s sensitive studies of Zorah present key differences from his primitive, sensual paintings of woman during his Fauvist period and illustrate his growing interest in Zorah as a civilized woman, not just a wild object to be sensationalized with color and form. This single prostitute stimulated Matisse to paint beyond the limits of the Fauve scope, which presents the paradox in which the artist first painted the Western women as raw, primitive sexual objects and then progressed in his career to depict a non-Western woman as a cultured, developed subject. Why did Morocco, far-removed from European destinations with its exotic landscape and Islamic culture, lead Henri Matisse to change the way he painted the female figure?

The Exhibit

The Gallery