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Each artist's treatment of women follows from his generalized artistic methods. As Matisse seeks to find beauty through spatial and color relations, he uses women as one of his primary props. In painting after painting, women sit in his studio beside fruit, goldfish, and some of his other trademark motifs. In Matisse's "Goldfish and Sculpture" of 1912, a reclining nude female lies at the right side of the picture and a large bowl of red goldfish are placed to the left of this woman. The entire painting is hazily depicted and in typical Matisse style, the colors stand out. In this picture, presumably a studio, one cannot make out the face of the model or sculpture but her breasts are visible as she lies with one arm resting against her head, possibly a provocative pose. Her body blends into a vase with flowers, which rests next to a fish. With my feminist eye, I am sometimes awed, sometimes horrified. There's beauty in the way he arranges his objects and the colors he chooses even if they are nude women. But I am horrified when the female nude occupies a lower position than a compositional object, in this case, a goldfish. Another Matisse painting, "The Studio, quai Saint-Michel" of 1916-17, features a reclining nude model lying on a red floral couch atop a red floral sheet in Matisse's studio. Unlike many of his other images of nude models, Matisse depicts her facial features. It is difficult to discern whether the model is simply posing for the painter or is resting between poses. The artist's chair is empty and the canvas shows a half-drawn painting. The studio, which is a depiction of Matisse's actual studio at the time in Paris, overlooks water and buildings. Viewing this painting like "Goldfish and Sculpture," and almost every still life displayed in this exhibit, I come up against the same conflicting responses: My eye jumps toward the bold and unique pairing of colors, and I grapple with Matisse's unusual use of space. But the image of a woman, devoid of life, is intensely disconcerting. In the other paintings in the exhibition, Matisse depicts nude women in different scenes, colors and the perspective, but still places them in the same role--that of a powerless but sexual object. Near the end of the exhibition, the curators juxtapose Matisse and Picasso's depictions of odalisques, which are female slaves or concubines in a harem. Matisse was intrigued by the "Orient" and often incorporated Asian styles of ornamentation in his paintings. Nineteenth-century French artists who had visited the Arab world, such as Eugene Delacroix and Jean Auguste Dominique Ingres, helped to popularize these "exotic" women. Despite the sharp contrasts between Picasso's and Matisse's representations of women, Picasso ultimately chooses the odalisque, one of the most overtly degrading historical images of women and calls it his primary inheritance from Matisse. Picasso told the English surrealist painter and modern art collector, Roland Penrose: "When Matisse died, he left me his odalisques as a legacy, and this is my idea of the Orient, though I have never been there." Two months after Matisse's death in 1954, Picasso began a 15 painting cycle on variations of Eugene Delacroix's "Women of Algiers." The three paintings displayed in this cycle: "Women of Algiers, After Delacroix, Canvas M," "Women of Algiers, After Delacroix, Canvas N" and "Women of Algiers, After Delacroix, Canvas O." In each of these canvases, Picasso breaks the odalisques into unusual forms, but remains true to traditional odalisque image by making the women's bare breasts a prominent feature in the paintings. The curators draw specific attention to the image of the odalisque as another major proof that Matisse and Picasso borrowed and learned from each other. The curators compare the use of the odalisque but never probe why Picasso specifically chose the odalisque, the female slave, as his "primary inheritance" from Matisse. Perhaps, this would reveal much more about what the artists sought to learn from one another. Was Picasso's use of the odalisque simply an homage to Matisse? Or, was Picasso making a larger statement by choosing more traditional female imagery? "Demoiselles" challenged the idea of the female nude and in turn challenged art historical conventions. Could this use of traditional female imagery in the traditional sense signify that Picasso has chosen to backpedal away from the modern? Both Picasso and Matisse's use of the female imagery speak beyond their ideas of women. They could help the viewer understand more about their broader ideas on painting, what conventions they challenged, and where they were content to reiterate certain long-held Western art practices. By failing to probe how each artist depicts women, the curators leave out a large part of the story.
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