Blue Nude (Souvenir de Biskra)

A reclining nude Matisse painted only because the clay sculpture of her broke in his studio, sent to the 1907 Salon so ugly on purpose that six years later a Chicago crowd burned copies of it and put the painter on mock trial.

1. 1
   The twisted, impossible pose

   The whole reclining figure, head at upper left, legs at right

   She lies on her side, but her torso wrenches up and around toward us while her hips stay turned away, so you read the front and the back of one body at the same time. One arm bends up behind the head; the spine makes a long S-curve. This is a sculptor’s pose, not a life-class one, the same twist Matisse was modeling in clay, which is why it feels carved into the canvas rather than observed across a studio.
2. 2
   Blue shadow doing the modeling

   Along the underside of the torso, the far breast, the crook of the bent arm, the hollows of the body

   The “blue” of the title is not her skin; it is the shadow. Matisse pushes passages of blue into the hollows and undersides of the body the way a sculptor pushes shadow into clay with a thumb, so a flat painting reads as something with weight and volume. The same blue bleeds out of the body and into the grass, which ties the figure and the ground into one surface instead of a figure set in front of a background.
3. 3
   The remembered palm and the oasis

   Upper right and behind the figure, the fronded plant and the band of “grass”

   A stylized palm and a strip of vegetation set her in an oasis, the Biskra of the title, remembered rather than observed. The ground she lies on is the “opaque blue grass” the hostile critics fixed on. It is not a window onto a real desert; it is a flat band of color, a memory of a place stitched in behind a studio nude.
4. 4
   The swelling hip and the heavy contour

   Center of the canvas, the great upward curve of the hip and buttock, and the dark line around the whole body

   The hip swells up to the highest point of the whole composition, and a thick, deliberate dark contour rings the figure like a drawn outline. Academic “finish,” the smooth invisible blending of a Salon nude, is simply gone. Look how the curve of the buttock is echoed by the hollow under the palm fronds: body and plant rhyme with each other, the picture built on repeated shapes.
5. 5
   The bulked, simplified body and its sources

   The whole mass of the figure, the broad shoulders, the blunt simplified features, the weightiness

   The body is broadened and simplified into mass over grace, closer to a carved idol than to a graceful Salon nude. This is the moment Matisse and his circle (Picasso, Derain, Vlaminck) were looking hard at African and other non-European sculpture arriving in Paris through colonial channels, their makers unnamed, a turn art historians call primitivism. Scholars split on what Matisse meant by it, whether he is critiquing or reinforcing Western ideals of the nude in the colony, and that reading is a live argument, not a settled fact.
6. 6
   Color that recurs across body and plant

   Everywhere, the skin, the plants, the lips and nipples

   The paint is laid on visibly and roughly, and the colors repeat across the whole surface: red turns up in the palm stem and again in the lips and nipples, pink in both the figure and the base of the palm, blue in both the body’s shadows and the grass. Nothing pretends to be a faithful copy of nature. It is a built surface of a few colors thrown back and forth between the woman and the oasis until the two are made of the same paint.