Still Life with Aubergines

Still Life with Aubergines is an important oil on canvas painting created by Henri Matisse in 1911. This large-scale work dates from a highly fertile period, executed during the summer of 1911 while the artist was staying in Collioure. The painting exemplifies the artist’s increasing move toward decorative complexity and flat abstraction, synthesizing the expressive use of color inherent in Fauvism with a structured, almost rhythmic composition.

The canvas presents a heavily patterned interior where the subjects are integrated into a visually dense environment. The scene is dominated by the titular purple aubergines (eggplants) placed alongside other fruits, decorative bowls, and richly textile-covered surfaces. Matisse employs expansive, unmodulated fields of vivid color, particularly deep blues, greens, and ochres, which eliminate traditional Western depth and shadow in favor of pure ornamentation. The artist deliberately disrupts the established rules of perspective, creating ambiguous spatial relationships where patterned walls and floors seem to merge onto a single plane.

Matisse’s goal during this era was to achieve a balance between representation and surface design, aiming for an art that offered serenity and emotional resonance through color and form. The painting reflects his long-standing fascination with non-Western art, particularly Islamic decorative motifs, which informed his approach to rhythm, repetition, and the saturation of the picture plane. This work is crucial for understanding the transition between Matisse’s earlier, explosive color experiments and the more measured, decorative abstractions he pursued later in the decade.

This influential piece of modern French painting is an iconic example of the still life genre redefined for the 20th century. Today, the work is held in the renowned permanent collection of the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA), New York. Although the original resides securely in the museum, high-quality prints and reproductions of the work are widely distributed, allowing global access to the inventive artistry Matisse achieved during the productive season of Collioure, summer 1911.