The Moroccans

The Moroccans is a pivotal oil on canvas painted by Henri Matisse, primarily executed during late 1915 and the fall of 1916. Although the work is titled for and conceptually derived from the artist's transformative visits to Tangier in 1912 and 1913, the piece was painted in France, at his studio in Issy-les-Moulineaux. This period coincides with the intense structural and psychological pressures of World War I, which profoundly influenced Matisse’s output, pushing his style toward starker abstraction and rigorous structural organization.

The painting stands as a foundational work of French modernism, marking a clear divergence from the immediate sensuality of his earlier Fauvist experiments. Rather than relying on vibrant, descriptive color, Matisse utilizes large, disciplined fields of deep, enveloping black, cool blue, and somber ochre. These elements are used to suppress detail and simplify the depicted scene—which includes abstracted architectural forms suggestive of a mosque, figures clustered in contemplation, and still life elements—into essential, almost hieroglyphic shapes. The composition is highly planar and typically read as three horizontal zones that separate the spatial elements into pure pictorial constructions.

This highly conceptual treatment demonstrates Matisse’s commitment to distilling his subjective memory of the exotic location into universal forms. The deliberate rejection of conventional perspective and atmospheric modeling makes the canvas a crucial transitional step toward the structural minimalism that would define his work for the rest of the decade. Today, this masterwork resides within the permanent collection of the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) in New York, where it is celebrated as a critical example of the artist’s wartime exploration of form. Its significant historical status means that high-quality prints and materials related to the painting are frequently available for study.