A room with a view to Tahiti

Window to Tahiti is a painting executed by Matisse sometime between 1935 and 1936. That’s five or six years after his short visit to Tahiti. This painting is quite unique, in the sense of building a South Seas feeling not only from the setting or the subject matter, but through the accentuated presence of outlines. Without them, without these thick, bold, loud contours, one would imagine any other place on earth. The balustrade looks European. The ship does it too. The trees could be any trees, the island in the distance could be any island.

Source: Feasting with Matisse

But then, after exploring the calm of the setting and the insistence of these outlines, one discovers the border of white Pacific flowers. And that brings attention to something more local, more likely to appear as a Tahitian landscape. Funny, the way Matisse so often employed funny: you need to take your eyes off his central scene for a second to know exactly where you are. And so, the identity of the place is decentralized. It doesn’t happen in the middle, where most viewers would expect the stronghold of the message to feature prominently, but on the edges of the painting itself. It is through this element of decoration that Matisse, as almost always, blows a different life into the subject matter and changes the piece to the point of reconfiguration.

Then there are the outlines, like I said. They remind me of Gauguin.

Insofar as the shapes are concerned, once again, the curve predominates. It’s in the clouds, in the tree crowns, in the folds of the curtain, which looks as diaphanous as a cloud of steam out of a coffee pot. All this spells out lavishness, luxuriance, abundance, languorous pleasure mixed with the smoothness of an unspoken desire.