灰裤宫女

Through the 1920s Matisse was living down in Nice, and rather than the open sea light you might expect, he shut himself into rented rooms and turned them into small theatre sets, with folding screens, striped hangings, and a model posed as an odalisque, the harem woman of old Orientalist fantasy. He painted this around 1926 and showed it at the Paris Salon d'Automne in 1927, where one critic wondered aloud how such a jumble of blue, red and violet stripes managed not to look like cheap wallpaper. The patterns nearly swallow the room. The red and the big fabric motifs press flat to the surface until there is almost no depth, just a little table and a brazier to say where the floor is. The model wears the grey culottes that give the picture its name, about the only quiet note in a room made entirely of pattern.