Seated Odalisque, Left Knee Bent, Ornamental Background and Checkerboard

After the First World War Matisse left Paris for the light of Nice, and for most of the 1920s he turned his rented rooms there into a private theater. He hung them with carpets, screens and striped North African cloth gathered on trips to Morocco and Spain, then dressed his models as odalisques, the harem women of a European fantasy of the East, and posed them among the patterns. This seated figure of 1928 is one of them, left knee bent, set against an ornamental ground and a checkerboard floor. Matisse said the fabrics mattered as much as the body, that they did the same work as the nude. Flower and stripe and skin all press forward at once, flattened into one bright, patterned surface.