Matisse in Morocco

The remarkable and little-known story of Henri Matisse and his groundbreaking time in Morocco, a fertile period that transformed his art and cemented his legacy.In winter of 1912, Henri Matisse—forty-two, nearing mid-career, and yet to find lasting critical acceptance, public admiration, or financial security since exploding to the forefront of the avant-garde in 1905 with his iconoclastic Fauve paintings—was struggling. Once the vanguard leader, the Parisian avant-garde now considered him passé. His important early collectors, including Gertrude and Leo Stein, had stopped buying his work and were fully championing Picasso, and he had exhibited little in the last few years. In the face of Cubism that was now dominating the art scene, Matisse needed to get away from Paris in order to advance his distinctive artistic vision.Almost on a whim, he went to Tangier. Matisse had already been profoundly inspired by Islamic art, and was primed for his arrival in the Moroccan city where such art