‘OUR HEART POINTS TO
THE SOUTH’
1917–1929

In late 1917, Matisse moved to Nice, in the south of France. The following period saw him move away from the experimental direction of his earlier work to focus on interior scenes, in which the female model reopened, in fresh ways, the question of how to position the figure in space, as seen in Figure décorative sur fond ornemental [Decorative Figure on an Ornamental Background]. The props and postures in his compositions contain echoes of his travels in the Maghreb and Spain.

Former Fauves such as Albert Marquet and Kees van Dongen found that time spent under Mediterranean light (Spain, Algeria, Egypt) hastened a reworking of their visual solutions. For Natalia Goncharova, who discovered Spain in 1916, the archetype of the woman in a mantilla became the basis for an exploration in which hieratic form and decorative elements—reminiscent of icon art—resonated with Matisse’s own artistic reflections.