In The Moorish Screen, a pair of women in white and pink dresses stand and sit in front of two panels of cotton tapestry with embroidery that imitates the fretwork of North African architectural screens. While the fireplace, bedstead, and two tables locate us in an ordinary bedroom, the layered screen, rugs, and wallpaper infuse the picture with the tension of color and repeated pattern.
In the early 1900s, Henri Matisse became an avid collector of embellished functional artifacts, such as rugs, wall hangings, and ceramic tiles, from Spain, North Africa, and other parts of the Islamic world. He turned to them while developing a decorative type of painting that was meant to pull the viewer from tangible reality toward an ethereal realm of sensation and emotion. Here the screen blurs our perception of the real space of the room by blocking the view of its corner.
A public scandal over the challenging appearance of his works—the rawness and immediacy of their color in particular—brought fame to Henri Matisse (French, 1869–1954) in 1905. Matisse, however, was no less remarkable as a draftsman. Though the artist’s work went through many changes over a long career, its essential method was to distill his emotional response to a given still life, landscape, or human form (his principal theme) in luminous color and pure, flowing line. The museum’s holdings cover aspects of Matisse’s work from 1900 to 1950 across the mediums of painting, sculpture, drawing, printmaking, the artist’s book, and ceramics. Many of the key works came as gifts from Philadelphians who collected Matisse in the years following World War I.
Source: Philadelphia Museum of Art
