John Goodrich considers Henri Matisse’s Laurette in Green Robe (Black Background) in the collection of the Metropolitan Museum of Art.

Goodrich observes: “We … may become aware of something particularly lively about this semblance of a woman in a chair: the sense of her weight, and how her forms expand rhythmically across the chair, which surrounds and supports her almost like a giant blossom. It’s as if figure and chair had generated themselves from some sort of autonomous, internal energy. And if you are sensing this, you are feeling the genius of Matisse’s contrivances in color.”