Odalisque aux magnolias

After the First World War Matisse left Paris for the light of Nice, took rooms above the sea, and spent much of the 1920s turning them into imaginary harems. The model here is Henriette Darricarrère, a young woman from Nice who danced and posed for him through most of the decade. The silks, screens and cushions around her were studio props, and the whole exotic scene is staged, invented in a rented apartment on the Mediterranean coast. While younger painters in Paris pushed toward pure abstraction, Matisse went the other way, into colour, pattern and ease, and thought of pictures like this as a kind of rest. The magnolias are a Mediterranean flower, standing in for the warm South he was building indoors.