 Hi everybody and welcome to today's Barnes Takeout. My name is Amy Gillette and I'm a collections researcher. Today let's head upstairs to room number 19 and we're going to look at this little painting up here painted by a French artist Henri Matisse in 1922 to 1923 entitled Moorish Woman and I realize we can't see it very well right here but before we zoom in um let's just briefly look at its context here in room number 19. It belongs to this kind of upper rim of four images that Matisse painted in Nice right after he'd left his family home in Paris um shown in this giant image entitled the music lesson showing his family and then I guess for a bit of further grounding inside this room I do notice that there are a number of other portraits in here by for example Heimstuk Ting, Rousseau, Amadeo Modigliani and maybe you can read this picture in a sort of discourse of how do you um paint individual human beings based on what about them you want to convey and then tie these together with the objects that you see maybe we can even see that this boy here is sitting on a chair or resembles a chair sort of frontally or maybe even the way in which the legs of Matisse's son over here are splayed out a bit like the and iron so anyway let's go on in and look more closely at Moorish Woman. So this was a model named Henriette that Matisse worked with quite a lot in Nice. She's lounging on an armchair it belongs to the tradition of and and what we call an otolese sort of this depiction of um lounging North African Middle Eastern women um although she of course was French she wears a green veil over her hair um gold necklace that looks a bit like coins to me um these delightful rings on her finger she's got a sort of mask like face with rather blank eyes and Matisse was experimenting with the color black at this time you might be able to see it in the sort of shadows and outlines she has this cross on her forehead which I think I ought to point out has absolutely nothing to do with Ash Wednesday but rather was a facial tattoo that Berber women in North Africa would wear and then she's got this transparent sort of gold flecked skirt that doesn't do much I suppose by way of um covering so much as accentuating her curves and letting us see the gold pattern on top in the same way that the walls I think are covered with textiles here but the patterns on the top of it almost seem to be free to be taking on a life of their own and so I'd like to think then about what Matisse was trying to accomplish um conceptually artistically with Moorish women now like I mentioned we call this image type in Odeliz that belongs to a kind of French tradition of orientalizing images of um Middle Eastern and North African places and to ground that a bit over here on the right hand side I've got a map at a map of the African continent around the time that Matisse was painting Moorish women you can see that it's so very heavily colonized and everything that is in this lightish purple lilac color is French blue in North Africa as well as West Africa and here on the left hand side is slightly earlier done in the 1880s by the artist Jerome but a very typical image um and that French people would paint of these territories it's a snake term where we see this beautiful boy from the back with the snake wrapped around the glorious um calligraphy in the in the like lovely turquoise tilework and it's such a pretty image but it conveys this idea of people in North Africa is perhaps rather effeminate stuck in time people that might be benefiting and please realize I'm saying this with like air quotes from some like good masculine French colonial rule and even though Matisse a bit earlier had turned away from this paradigm I think it's important to note that Moorish woman does engage it to be quite clear about that but anyway what had gone Matisse really intrigued by Islamic art was this exhibition in Colo in Munich back in the year 1910 and so it's a poster from there Australian means exhibition in Munich 1910 down here it says masterworks of Muhammad on again again air quotes now we'd say the sonic of Islamic art that he attended and seen metalworks other decorative works manuscripts carpets um things precious and utilitarian and thought that they were fabulous which prompted him soon after to go on a trip to southern Spain as well as north Africa and of these Moorish territories probably the most impactful for his work for Moorish woman I should say was um was the Alhambra Palace in Granada in Spain built mostly in the 1300s by the Moorish dynasty so here's the exterior and I'm going to show you some of the most captivating areas of the interior where we're going to go pretty much right into the center of it to the court of the lions that you see on the left hand side called this because we've got this fountain basin in the center resting on the backs of these lions feeding into these four channels that lead out into the arcaded areas of the courtyard and the um you can see that the upper bits of it the arches um the spandals are made out of this really intricate stucco work that even though it is architectural it looks like lace like like diaphanous with the light piercing through and you can just imagine being here like on a on a bright day with the rippling water shimmering marble the light passing through um through here like dematerializing it and then likewise these the court of the lions opens up into these four pavilions in the corner that are capped with these star shaped domes covered in mcarnus faults which means honeycomb you can see again these are surrounded by windows with tessellations inside so the sun moves around and catches different parts of these like hollowed out triangular shaped domes um to convey these almost like messages of the structure of the cosmos and then very nearby here kind of opening up right off with the royal baths where we've got these niches with more gorgeous stucco work but also these tile tessellations kind of love of pattern that you see in um in morish woman but then the actual like pierced vaults of the roof with these star shapes that as the light passes through um gives these like moving cosmic patterns on the tessellated um and and stucco walls and so this was something that matisse did want to try and capture in some of his later works and he can't carry um and morish architecture back to france within kenny but he can recreate it to an extent with with textiles with soft architecture for instance and so here's an example of um of a heady cloth from typical of north africa although he probably actually bought it in a market in niece that if you look back does remind quite a lot of these um of these niches that we see at the alhambra and here he is um using it in this other niece period picture over there and and kept capturing it as well with um very similar textiles that you might recognize from the barn's painting morish woman and so here's matisse in a studio in niece looking very scholarly and artistic here's his model ariette um lounging with her jewels with her hair and pants in her pose um amidst all of these textiles that matisse has collected and draped to create this sort of morish um and the the the german word is um stimmung there's no i think apt english translation but it's almost like an atmosphere in a sort of um an an almost moral sense but it's not even just that that he's working with and so as much as he's kind of creating this morish interior it seems and i don't know for sure but scholars have definitely commented on the extent to which the model's face has turned into a mask um almost like many of the west african masks that had been collected as well from french colonial africa um then some of which are on display um nearby in rooms 2021-22 at the barn's and i brought out this puny mask from gaban um just in this as an example not causal so that you can compare for for yourself and see if you see the similarities but what matisse had had to say about african masks or i should say masks from west africa were that they're kind of architectonics were a way of capturing not really just say the outer surface of a human being but something more essential about them whether say that has to do with the model herself or again the kind of ambience that he was trying to channel through this picture and that um that in brief is an open question but to go to one more object that matisse was working with for this image it's actually completely different cultural context it is this sculpture done um in the early 1500s by the famous italian artist sculptor michelangelo it's a personification of night um in the tomb of the medici family in florins and there was a a plaster cast of this in nis that matisse was obsessed with and worked with frequently not um and you may be able to see that he's not copied but emulated the body of night um for moorish women for moorish women and if if the idea of night was more conceptual ideological i don't know but i think it's wonderful to compare um just the marvellous depiction of flesh in this painting versus this one especially vis-a-vis a mask like articulation of the face and maybe this is a kind of paragonia or comparison of what like sculpture can achieve versus painting um one difference that you may be noticing is the breasts um where um michelangelo did work with um male models you might be able to tell in the breasts look a bit like kind of um spheres affixed onto the body whereas matisse's um especially with his like experimentation with black paint here um looks so very like fleshy and naturalistic by comparison but you know i think in short something that we do know about matisse is that he um he loved things he collected things art um cloth mass um tables chairs decorative objects and he was the kind of person um and i say this because i sympathize that once he'd kind of worn out a pair of shoes would feel sentimental and be sad to let them go because he really did think that things were active in their way and and pictures wanted to bring them together in order to make a picture that likewise was active and came alive in the like emotional um mental interactions with the viewer and so while while we don't necessarily know in his own words how these ingredients were supposed to come together in morse woman i think that is an amazingly affecting painting and i hope that you'll think so as well when you come back to visit the barns and so that is it for today's takeout and thank you so much for joining i'm tom collins new bower family executive director of the barns foundation i hope you enjoyed barns takeout subscribe and make sure your post notifications are on to get daily servings of art thanks for watching and for your support of the barns foundation