Odalisca con pantalones rojos

After the First World War, Henri Matisse spent his winters in Nice, turning rented rooms into small stage sets. Out of them came dozens of odalisques, reclining women in loose trousers and thin tunics among the patterned screens and hangings he carried from room to room. This one wears embroidered red Moorish trousers and lies against a wall of ornament that nearly swallows her. It is an invented Orient, assembled from studio props rather than any real harem, and Matisse made little secret of the staging. The woman's face is reduced to a few essential marks while the fabrics take all his attention. He painted it in the mid-1920s, in his apartment on the Place Charles-Felix, where he kept a wardrobe of costumes for exactly these scenes.