MATISSE AT THE MOVIES: Orientalist Cinema, Female Agency, and the Modernist Imagination

Orientalist tropes were a dominant feature of European cinema in the 1920s. This talk explores the types of film that influenced Henri Matisse’s paintings of Odalisques produced during this period and shows how popular cinematic culture set the stage for an exploration of gender, identity, and exoticism in painting. Challenging familiar interpretations of Matisse’s depictions of women in Orientalist costume, this talk examines the theme of female agency in the works against the background of tourism, fashion, and colonialism.

A reception sponsored by the Kathryn B. Gore Chair in French Studies will follow in Room 114 Newcomb Hall.

Dr. Kathryn Brown is a professor of art history at Loughborough University in the United Kingdom where she specializes in 19th- and 20th-century French literature and visual culture. Her books include Women Readers in French Painting 1870–1890 (Routledge, 2012) and Matisse’s Poets: Critical Performance in the Artist’s Book (Bloomsbury, 2017). She is the editor of The Art Book Tradition in Twentieth-Century Europe (Routledge, 2013), Interactive Contemporary Art: Participation in Practice (IB Tauris, 2014), and Perspectives on Degas (Routledge, 2016).