Salons, or even to the Orientalist Painters (imagining for a moment that Bénédite might have ac-cepted them). Instead he managed a feat neither Renoir nor Monet had accomplished with theirMediterranean canvases—displaying them as a coherent group in a one-man thematic show at a pres-tigious gallery. Only Albert Besnard, whose showmanship far exceeded Matisse ’s, achieved the samecoup with his immensely successful Indian exhibition at the Galerie Georges Petit in 1912.2

Matisse ’s North African experience was not in itself the determining moment in a nascent career.Matisse, unlike Albert Lebourg and Victor Prouvé, was not thereby converted to a resonant high-color palette. That had already happened during Matisse ’s fauve years in France. Like Renoir, Ma-tisse was a mature artist who responded to a new stimulus in a largely preexisting language, althoughNorth Africa gave him, far more than Renoir, thematic inspirations that remained relevant through-out his career (as two recent exhibitions have demonstrated).3

As for Matisse ’s Moroccan work itself, nothing painted in the first half-century under the aegis ofexoticism was further from the appearance of humdrum French realist Orientalism, from the routineacademic exoticism that still cluttered the Salons of the Société des Artistes Français and the Orien-talist Painters. Yet it should be no heresy to suggest that behind this radicality deep cultural conti-nuities persist and that the conception of these Maghrebian subjects and the very discursive bound-aries within which Matisse conceived his abstracting, high-color visual treatment both owe much toOrientalist traditions. It is salutary to deprive the artist of the pedestal on which modernist hagiog-raphy has placed his North African works, splendid though they be. A postcolonial criticism mustwork against the historical amnesia typical of dominant accounts of the artist’s work.4

Biskra, or the Impossibility of Painting

No longer a part of the desert, Biskra is the queen of the oases no more.

She has been deposed and sullied; her jewels are paste. Now she ’s a mere

figurehead for the crowds to ogle, estranged from the deep and mystic

soul of the Sahara.

–isabelle eberhardt, “Desert Springtime,” ca. 1902

Matisse ’s first North African excursion is an event of considerable resonance for this history of Ori-entalism, even though—or indeed because—it occasioned no significant work. The centrality of Ma-tisse ’s destination, Biskra—an iconic site of Orientalist experience—his traveler’s impressions, andthe reasons for his “failure” are all symptomatic of the Orientalist predicament. And because his muchgreater output of work in Tangier six years later continued that deferred project of painting the East,the earlier experience is worth considering.

Matisse, going to Africa in 1906, did something more commonplace for a French artist than trav-

1 6 0 M a t i s s e a n d M o d e r n i s t O r i e n t a l i s m