The Moroccans

Henri Matisse, 1916 · Gallery 506 · Floor 5

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. Matisse spent two winters in Tangier, in Morocco. And then back in France, he painted what he remembered. He was always going south for the light. And down there, it's brutal. So... we've got three big sections, all sort of elbowing into the black. Up on the left, a white dome behind a balcony. A kind of flowerpot on the rail. Below that, a whole pile of green shapes. Round peachy things tucked in among them. Underneath, a crooked white grid, almost like a tiled floor. And over on the right, all that dusty pink, almost kind of mauve. Inside of that, a man in a white turban and a blue robe, with his back to us. The colors are quieter than you'd expect. Chalky whites, dull greens, that worn-looking blue. Now, those green lumps. Melons on the vine? Or the bowed backs and heads of men kneeling in prayer? Matisse said melons. Watermelons and gourds, he called them. Other people see men praying. You can flip between them all day. He'd been carrying the idea around for four years. He sketched it in a letter home to his wife, from Tangier, in 1912. By the time he finished the painting, it was 1916. He was in a studio outside Paris. And at Verdun, French and German soldiers were dying by the thousands. And there's all that black. Easy to read it as gloom. But that's not how Matisse explained it. Thirty-odd years later, he said this was where his blacks began. Black didn't have to mean shadow. Or night. It depended on the colors around it. Get those relationships right, and black could be part of the light, same as white. He wrote that the big black in his Moroccans glowed as brightly as any color in it. He'd painted light with it. Even the light of Tangier.

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