Woman and Anemones

For a long time this canvas carried the wrong date. It was catalogued as a work of 1937, and only later did its style and subject return it to 1920 or 1921, the first years Matisse spent working in Nice. Critics have often called that period his least experimental, set between the Fauve pictures before the First World War and his late work. The gallery sees his modernity in this canvas all the same. Matisse gives the woman, the vase of anemones and the room the same weight, setting them all on one flat plane. The setting is one of the hotel rooms he rented in Nice, and the red and white striped tablecloth in front is one of the furnishings that keep turning up in his pictures of those months.