The Yellow Curtain

Matisse painted this in 1915, at his house just outside Paris while France was more than a year into the war. He was 45, too old to be called up, and friends and family of his were caught up in the fighting. The paintings of these years turned darker and stranger than anything he had made before. He called it simply Composition. Only later did he explain that it shows the view from a curtained window at Issy-les-Moulineaux, the yellow of the curtain set against the blue glass canopy over his front door. The forms are flattened almost to the point of abstraction, the ordinary domestic scene pressed nearly out of sight.