Matisse, Henri - Odalisque with Raised Arms (1923)

The Patterns of Indulgence

Matisse was done with the cold rain of Paris and the radical heavy lifting of his youth. By 1923 he was living in Nice. He was chasing the light of the Mediterranean and playing dress-up in his studio. He took a young model named Henriette Darricarrère and turned her into a prop for a fake harem. This was not about the Orient or the exotic. It was about the wallpaper. It was about the way a body looks when it becomes a shape.

Odalisque with Raised Arms is a fight between a woman and a room. The stripes on the walls and the loud patterns on the textiles scream for attention. They fight to stay flat on the surface while Henriette tries to exist in space. Matisse did not care about the anatomy of her ribs or the precise weight of her limbs. He treated the human body like a bowl of fruit or a particularly nice piece of silk. She is just another element of the decor.

The critics of the time hated it. They said he had gone soft and lazy. They called it bourgeois charm. They thought the man who shook the world with Fauvism had retired into a life of easy commercial success. Maybe he had. Or maybe he just realized that life is short and sometimes you want to paint something that looks like the sun feels on your skin.

He found a way to make the three-dimensional world collapse into a series of beautiful colored shapes. It was a retreat. It was a retreat into a world where everything, even a human soul, could be flattened into a masterpiece of design. He wasn’t interested in her story. He was interested in her shadow. He was interested in how her skin caught the light against a backdrop of manufactured flowers and cheap cotton.

References

Matisse, Henri. Odalisque with Raised Arms. 1923. Oil on canvas. National Gallery of Art, Washington D.C.

Elderfield, John. The Drawings of Henri Matisse. New York: Thames and Hudson, 1984.

Flam, Jack. Matisse, The Man and His Art. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1986.

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