From the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York City: This work belongs to a group of paintings from the mid-1920s in which Matisse recalled his experiences in Morocco in 1912 and 1913. During these visits, the painter, like so many tourists before him, witnessed harems and became fascinated with their apparent blend of exoticism and eroticism. Showing a recumbent and seminude woman in a luxurious, inviting, and brightly patterned interior, Reclining Odalisque radiates with an outsider’s rapturous fantasies about the cultural and sexual liberation associated with Morocco.
