Painting Portraits in Private

Abstract

Henri Matisse and Hilda Rix left Paris in early February 1912 for the Moroccan city of Tangier. They stayed in the Grand Hôtel Villa de France for most of February and March. Matisse visited again in October of that year while Rix returned in 1914 accompanied by her sister. Rix's painting style took a new turn, developing a post-impressionist style in oils that incorporated abstraction, a primary palette and a flattened picture plain. Both artists executed portraits, working with the same models, in an unused room provided by the owner of the hotel, that became a temporary studio space. Matisse complained that his radical compositions met with derision from the hotel's guests. Their art and letters produced in Tangier reveal the challenges they experienced in finding models and painting in public and in private. They were both representatives of European colonising cultures and committed advocates of modernism and of Morocco. Rix adopted a counter-orientalist position in lectures and articles upon her return to Australia.