THE MOROCCANS
HENRI MATISSE, 1916
Kind of a strange one... coming from the color guy. Look at all that black. A big empty field of it, right through the middle, holding everything else together. It's Morocco, remembered. Two winters in Tangier, a few years back. Three little fragments, floating in the dark. Up in the top left, a white mosque dome behind a balcony, a flowerpot perched on the rail. Bottom left, a tangle of green with round shapes in it. And over on the right, a man in a white turban and a blue robe, sitting with his back to you. They don't quite connect. They drift apart, like things you only half-remember. Now that green tangle, bottom left. Are those melons, ripening on the vine? Or the bowed backs and heads of men kneeling in prayer? Matisse won't tell you. They're both. You can flip between them all day. And that black. It looks like gloom, and Matisse swore it wasn't. He said the black is the sun. Down there the light's so brutal it scorches everything around it into hard black shadow. The darkest part of the painting is actually high noon. But look when he made it. 1916. A studio outside Paris, the First World War on, Verdun, the bloodiest battle of the whole war, grinding away. So that black is probably doing two jobs at once. The blinding sun he remembered, and the dark he was sitting in. A man reaching all the way back to the brightest place he'd ever been, from just about the darkest stretch of his life.