1946, Henri Matisse, Woman in White (Dame a la Robe Blanche) -- Metropolitan Museum of Art (New York) (special exhibition)
From the exhibition label: Matisse's four trips to New York in the 1930s included visiting Harlem jazz clubs almost nightly and seeing a Black play. He later demonstrated a stylistic affinity with the urbane New Negro aesthetic in a series of paintings of a Belgian Congolese neighbor, the journalist Elvire Van Hyfte. This richly decorative painting is replete with the visual language of modernism, from the model's delicately flattened, masklike face and broad shoulders to the bands of fuchsia that shape her dress. The seemingly boneless fingers, reminiscent of vegetation, entwined around her beaded necklace are an especially inventive detail.
1946, Henri Matisse, Woman in White (Dame a la Robe Blanche) -- Metropolitan Museum of Art (New York) (special exhibition)
From the exhibition label: Matisse's four trips to New York in the 1930s included visiting Harlem jazz clubs almost nightly and seeing a Black play. He later demonstrated a stylistic affinity with the urbane New Negro aesthetic in a series of paintings of a Belgian Congolese neighbor, the journalist Elvire Van Hyfte. This richly decorative painting is replete with the visual language of modernism, from the model's delicately flattened, masklike face and broad shoulders to the bands of fuchsia that shape her dress. The seemingly boneless fingers, reminiscent of vegetation, entwined around her beaded necklace are an especially inventive detail.