The exhibition devoted to Henri Matisse at Milan’s Mudec is no conventional retrospective. Its evocative title, The World in a Room (on view through Feb. 21), points to its central theme: the artist’s engagement with cultures beyond his own.

In the opening pages of the exhibition catalog, published by 24 Ore Cultura, American Art Historian Ellen McBreen argues that it is time to reconsider terms such as “the East” — a major source of inspiration for Matisse — and free them from the assumptions imposed by the colonial West. McBreen has conducted extensive research on the French Master at the Baltimore Museum of Art.

Nearly 50 years have passed since Edward Said’s influential writings on Orientalism, which examined how Europe, during the imperial and colonial eras, constructed representations of other cultures to control and subordinate them, including through art.

Where does Matisse fit into this history?

A man of his time, Matisse developed a rich visual vocabulary through travels to Algiers, Tangier and Tahiti, as well as Spain and Russia. His work reflects a range of cultural influences, from Arab and Islamic art to Chinese, Persian, Oceanic and African traditions. Yet, McBreen writes, Matisse “left little evidence of an interest in the social, religious or political context of the things he studied and collected.”

He was not an artist who invoked other cultures to advance sociopolitical arguments, as many do today. For Matisse, art was about form and its spiritual dimension. His imagination drew him toward what he perceived as new, even when its roots reached back to humanity’s earliest beginnings.

During his travels, he collected objects that might later appear in his paintings as quotations or allusions. The process resembles intertextuality, the literary practice of weaving references to earlier or contemporary writers into a new work.

A Tugu sculpture, for example, informs the contours of the female body in his 1906 woodcut Petit Bois clair and reappears in a sketch from shortly afterward. What McBreen calls an “African syntax” resurfaces in celebrated sculptures such as La Serpentine (1909) and Two Figures (1907–08).

A few years later, a journey through southern Spain introduced Matisse to Arab and Islamic culture in a way that left him spellbound. Writing to his wife, he described the Great Mosque of Córdoba as “a marvel.” His enthusiasm followed an earlier visit, in 1910, to a major exhibition of Islamic art in Munich.

The arabesque, Matisse later told André Verdet, “is the most concise means of expression at every stage. And it can be found, in its broad outlines, in certain cave paintings.” In Persian carpets and Arab miniatures, the arabesque becomes a driving force of artistic expression, an integral part of the composition rather than mere ornament.

In 1930, speaking with Tériade, who would later publish his book Jazz, Matisse offered a glimpse of his artistic philosophy: “Both the artist and the poet possess an inner light that transforms objects to create a new world … a living world that is, in itself, the unmistakable sign of the divine.”

The influence of earlier art can also be traced in Petite Mulâtresse — Fatma (1912), which echoes figures such as the one at the center of a 13th-century Kashan bowl. But, as McBreen observes, the portraits of Fatma also reveal how “the almost caricaturelike rendering of her face brings racial stereotypes into view, even at a distance.”

Formal experimentation was central to Matisse’s work, but the individuality of his models mattered, too. During the roughly yearlong period when he worked with an Italian model known as Lorette, about whom little is known, the erotic dimension of his art took on renewed importance. He made around 50 portraits of her, in what McBreen describes as “the beginning of a fetishistic impulse to portray the same woman in multiple forms.” The Three Sisters (1917), for instance, may present three variations on the Italian model’s face.

This approach differed from the one Matisse pursued between 1910 and 1911 in his five sculptural portraits of Jeanne Vaderin, known as Jeannette. In those works, the influence of African masks — including Kuba and Yoruba examples from his own collection — is unmistakable.

In his portraits and female nudes, Matisse distilled lines and reworked the visual grammar of solid and empty space, creating internal counterpoints that appear to draw on his study of African sculpture. Gradually, this thinking took shape in a style poised between abstraction and figuration. Ultimately, it led him to what might be called “sculpture with scissors”: his papiers découpés, or paper cutouts, which distilled what he had learned through his engagement with other cultures.

Cutting paper opened up a new expressive language in which color itself acquired sculptural force. A few years earlier, his linocuts had explored a similar tension, using predominantly black backgrounds against which white lines seemed to have been cut into the surface. In either positive or negative form, this became one of his most accomplished visual languages.

In the immediate postwar years, Matisse moved toward constellations of silhouettes, as seen in two large linen canvases devoted to the sky and sea of Oceania, on loan from Brussels. He brought this exploration to a culmination in 1952 with the abstract, iconic designs of the furnishings and stained-glass windows for the Chapel of Vence.

The message is clear: Art is not merely an image of something else. In its very existence, it is a hymn to the ineffable sacredness of creation.

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