The siesta, Marrakech

Description of the artwork

In March 1934, Jacques Majorelle organised a presentation of his last paintings at the Mamounya pavilion in Rabat. Visitors were surprised to discover that the painter of the kasbahs was now the painter of black nudes. This new series of works is in a larger format than that chosen for his Atlas paintings, and their obvious sensuality seems to defy those who criticised him for a certain dryness in his earlier work. With falsely modest pauses, these ebony, bronze and gold bodies exude a disturbing sensuality. But these sumptuous young black women, who are the descendants of the beautiful slaves from the Souss and Drâa valleys and brought back from Niger by the caravans from Timbuktu, are for Jacques Majorelle nothing more than pretexts for painting beautiful naked black women's bodies. They were the personification and the realisation of his dreams of ‘that unreal Orient that only poets know and which rarely offers itself to our gaze’, as he wrote to Etienne Cournault. Not without a certain mischievousness, he gives his paintings evocative titles such as ‘Les amies ingénues’, ‘tendre amitié’ or, as here, ‘La Sieste’. 

Technically, in this new series of black nudes, his subject matter has become even lighter. He likes to use large sheets of paper, sometimes tinted, as a support, covering them with soggy colours. He then models them by adding bright colours with a brush, mixing them with metallic powders (gold, copper, silver) or applying them nervously with his fingers to give them a more uneven relief. While the backgrounds are sometimes barely sketched, the figures appear extremely meticulous and realistic. 

Literature

Certificate n°2021 V 10-2/4 dated May 10, 2021 by Amélie Marcilhac and Françoise Zafrani