Odalisque

After the First World War Matisse spent his winters in a rented room at the Hôtel de la Méditerranée in Nice, and turned it into a small theatre. He hung fabrics on wires, spread rugs on the floor, and posed a model among the patterns as an odalisque, the word for a woman of an Ottoman harem. He had never lived that world. He built it from cloth and Mediterranean light and the memory of earlier trips to Morocco and southern Spain, a daydream of ease painted just after four years in which Europe had had very little of it. This reclining figure in a sheer top, eyes closed, belongs to that series. The picture also carries a darker history of its own. For 80 years it hung in the Stedelijk Museum in Amsterdam, which had bought it in 1941 from Albert Stern, a German-Jewish textile manufacturer selling what he owned to fund his family's escape from the Nazis. In 2024 a Dutch committee found the sale had been forced, and the museum agreed to return the painting to his heirs.