The year 1912 began quite badly for Henri Matisse. Once considered the king of the French avant-garde and Fauvism, he had recently been dethroned by a young Pablo Picasso and his Cubist cohort. Critical and financial support were now scarce for Matisse, and life in the cut-throat Paris art scene had become unbearable. Ready for a change of scenery — and of luck — the 42-year-old painter bought a one-way ticket to Tangier, Morocco’s storied port city. Matisse set off in search of luminous North African light, but all he got when he landed in Tangier was heavy, driving rain: “It’s been a downright flood,” he complained to a friend back home. The two-week-long deluge did more than dampen the artist’s spirits; he would later say that he’d been “entirely penniless” at the time, and “seriously contemplating suicide.”Fortunately, Matisse held on long enough to see the clouds part. Once the rain stopped, he quickly got to work exploring the city’s lush vegetation, distinct architecture, and varied population in his numerous drawings and paintings. The trip was so productive that he returned later that same year, and some might say that he never fully left.Henri Matisse, “The Kasbah Gate or Entrance to the Kasbah” (1912), oil on canvas (© 2024 Succession H. Matisse / Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York; photo courtesy Archives Henri Matisse)In Matisse in Morocco: A Journey in Light and Color, author Jeff Koehler argues that Tangier provided a singular creative context for the painter to grow and experiment, leading to artistic advances that would shape the rest of his career. The book explores this pivotal point in Matisse’s life and work, when an initially rocky trip abroad became an impetus for the artist’s growth. Nearly abstract works like “Moroccan Café” (1913) ushered in a new sense of experimentation, and his later odalisque paintings of the 1920s, which were inspired by the colors and textiles of his time in Tangier, brought Matisse the fame that had eluded him for so long.Matisse wasn’t the first European artist to seek inspiration in Tangier: The celebrated French painter Eugène Delacroix declared the ancient, cosmopolitan city to be “made for painters” some 80 years earlier, and used his Moroccan sketches to create works long after returning to France. Koehler writes that many Westerners saw the city through a simplistic, exoticized, and colonial lens. For example, the Australian artist Hilda Rix, who visited Morocco at the same time as Matisse, breathlessly characterizes a trip to Tangier’s market as “like walking through an Arabian nights story.”Henri Matisse, “Moroccan Café or Arabian Coffee House” (1913), glue colors on canvas (© 2024 Succession H. Matisse / Bridgeman Images)Koehler asserts that Matisse didn’t share these biases because he was looking to exploit Morocco’s light and color, rather than its people. But this theory is difficult to confirm: Neither the French takeover of the Moroccan sultanate in 1912 nor a harsh local drought that same year appear to have been of much concern to Matisse: “Everyone is desperate here because the planting is going to fail because of the drought,” the artist wrote to his daughter. “Me, inside, I rejoice because it is the perfect weather for my work.” In another letter, he described one of his models as “savage as a jackal.” These callous comments complicate the narrative of his time in Tangiers as a purely aesthetic pursuit. Still, Koehler successfully establishes Matisse’s long-standing reverence for Islamic art and decoration, which were strong influences in his work before and after trips to Tangier. We learn about the 1900 Paris Exposition and the 1910 Munich exhibition Masterpieces of Muhammadan Art, where the artist encountered more than 3,500 carpets, ceramics, mosaics, and other Islamic art objects. Koehler perceptively connects Matisse’s deep appreciation of these decorative art objects to his “upbringing among textiles” in Bohain, then a fabric manufacturing town in northern France.Henri Matisse, “The Standing Riffian” (1912), oil on canvas (© 2024 Succession H. Matisse / Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York; photo by Erich Lessing, courtesy Art Resource, New York)During both of his stays, Morocco emboldened Matisse’s way of looking and painting toward abstraction. Full of rapid, lively brushstrokes and jewel-toned colors, his canvases seem to successively push into daring territories of flatness and pattern. Koehler carefully traces the fate of these pioneering works from their creation around Tangier to their reception in Paris, eventual confiscation in Russia after the 1917 revolution, and a later exhibition between the United States and the USSR in 1990 and 1991.Along the way, Koehler weaves in fascinating stories about Matisse’s fellow artists, previous international journeys, and important but controversial collectors. One of them, the Russian businessman and arts patron Sergei Shchukin, wrote to Matisse before the artist’s first trip to Tangier with a prescient piece of advice: “The public is against you, but the future is yours.” Matisse in Morocco: A Journey in Light and Color (2025) by Jeff Koehler is published by Pegasus Books and is available online and through independent booksellers.