Domenico Cantatore - Grand Odalisque

The subject of the reclining female body has its roots in sixteenth-century painting, particularly in the Veneto region (Giorgione and Titian). This iconography enjoyed great popularity in the nineteenth century, from the Impressionists and Post-Impressionists to the twentieth-century avant-garde. Often chosen as a tribute to pictorial tradition, the subject of the reclining woman serves as a yardstick for measuring both changing customs and pictorial languages.

The composition of this painting reveals the influence of the rationality of the Italian pictorial tradition on Cantatore. The entire surface of the work is punctuated by bold, dark lines, almost forming a grid over which the large female figure dominates. The odalisque herself is also constructed through a series of pure lines, which break down and recompose the monumental body. In a predominantly flat, depthless composition, which nevertheless tends toward expressionistic simplification, the undulating rhythm of the dress helps us perceive the forms, the fullness of the reclining body.

After initially training as a self-taught artist and gaining initial experience in Milan, Cantatore moved to Paris in 1932, where he met Picasso and the Fauves, updating his artistic language to the historical avant-garde. Despite this, Cantatore remained faithful to a figurative tradition, albeit interpreting it with an attitude toward expressionist synthesis. He never belonged to any artistic group. In general, after the great season of the historical avant-garde, a desire for a return to order, objectivity, and the recovery of plastic values ​​spread throughout European painting: a need which this work also fits into. Cantatore's "Grande Odalisque" reminds us how Picasso himself, after the Cubist period, devoted his work to the rediscovery of a monumental classicism, yet always filtered through a contemporary language.

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