Informed Comment

Photograph by Juan Cole of graffiti, Tahrir Square, mid-May 2012, showing the Supreme Council of the Armed Forces as the puppeteer of Egyptian politics. (Since erased in a government campaign to clear graffiti).

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Henri Matisse, Zorah: La Robe Jaune. Oil on Canvass. Morocco, 1912. Collection Cowles

it has been argued that Matisse stepped back, on his first trip in Morocco, from painting “wild, Fauvist women” to a more mature concern with the person and culture of his model, the Moroccan courtesan Zorah, whom he names and whom he shows clothed in her everyday dress.

Henri Matisse (1869-1954) was a leader of the “Fauvist” movement in modern French painting, “characterized by its spontaneity and roughness of execution as well as use of raw color straight from the palette to the canvas.” He was deeply influenced by his trips to Morocco in 1912 and 1913.

Later in life, Matisse referred to two of his Morocco-period paintings as “pivotal.”

See also Matisse’s “Algerian Woman” and his “The Moroccans”

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Photograph by Juan Cole, May, 2012

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Pierre-Auguste Renoir (1841-1919)
A dos de chameau
signed ‘Renoir.’ (lower right)
oil on canvas
28 3/8 x 29½ in. (72 x 75 cm.)
Painted in Algeria in 1881

( Just sold by Christies at auction for $2.7 million)

The impressionist painter Pierre-Auguste Renoir (1841–1919) began achieving some success after the turmoil attendant on the Franco-Prussian War and the Paris Commune had ended, and the Third Republic got into full swing. He was part of the joint first impressionist exhibit in 1874. In 1881, Renoir visited Algeria, perhaps inspired by the Romantic Orientalist paintings of Eugène Delacroix (1798-1863).

Algeria and his subsequent travels in Spain and Italy caused Renoir to rethink some of the orthodoxies of impressionism, especially the use of short brush strokes and aversion to dark colors, leading to his early 1880s “harsh” style.

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Paul Klee, the Swiss-German modernist painter, experienced epiphanies during the ‘student trip’ he took with two other young artists to Tunisia in 1914. It was there that he, deeply influenced by the color and the quality of the light (which other European artists have remarked on), he “began his path toward abstraction,” as the brochure of the NYC Metropolitan Museum notes.

Of Hamamet, now a major tourist resort city, Klee wrote according to June Taboroff, “The city is magnificent,” related Klee, “right by the sea, full of bends and sharp corners. Now and then I get a look at the ramparts! In the streets more women are to be seen than in Tunis…. The reeds and bushes provide a beautiful rhythm of patches. Superb gardens in the vicinity. Giant cactuses form walls. A path with cactuses… Painted a good deal and sauntered around.”

There is a real sense in which Klee became an artist in Tunisia, gaining spiritual confidence, especially from the old Islamic center of Kairouan, and learning from the encompassing night and the limpid daylight how to see things without being trapped by their forms. To that extent, Tunisia gave us Klee and a stream of German modernism. In 1920 Klee was called to teach at Bauhaus.

(Hammamet today:)

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The Moroccans
Henri Matisse (French, 1869–1954)
Issy-les-Moulineaux, late 1915 and fall 1916. Oil on canvas, 71 3/8″ x 9′ 2″ (181.3 x 279.4 cm). Gift of Mr. and Mrs. Samuel A. Marx. © 2012 Succession H. Matisse, Paris

For Matisse in Morocco, see this page.

Here is the MOMA audio description:

See also my previous post on Matisse and The Algerian Woman

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Photograph by Juan Cole, May 2012

Line of tanks that Mu’tasim Qaddafi deployed against the civilians of the city of Misrata, Libya, March-August 2011– destroyed and kept as a memorial outside the city.

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