The two weeks in the oasis

In the spring of 1906, Henri Matisse (the French painter, then thirty-six and a year past the 1905 “wild beasts” scandal that had made him famous, when his violently colored canvases got him and his circle nicknamed the Fauves) got on a boat and spent about two weeks in Algeria, the French colony across the Mediterranean. Part of that fortnight he spent in Biskra(pronounced “BIS-kra”), a desert oasis town on the northern edge of the Sahara, the kind of place the French press had been selling back home for sixty years as a postcard, a green spot of palms and water in an ocean of sand, taken by French troops in the 1840s and run as a winter resort ever since.

And he did not paint this picture there. He painted very little of consequence in Biskra at all. He looked, he sketched a street, he bought a few local textiles and pots, and then he came home to France. The trip mattered, but it mattered the way a trip matters a year later, when you are back in your own cold studio and the heat and the palms and the light have cooked down in your memory into something simpler and stranger than the actual place.

That is exactly what the title tells you. The French is Nu bleu, Souvenir de Biskra, and the operative word is souvenir, which in French means a memory, a recollection, the thing you carry home, not the trinket you buy. The picture is not a scene of Biskra. It is a memory of Biskra, made back in France in early 1907, and the difference is the whole point. A reader who expects a travel painting, an oasis with a figure in it, is going to be confused by what actually arrives. What arrives is a single distorted body on a band of impossible blue grass, with one stylized palm behind it, standing in for a whole country remembered.

And it is worth being honest about what that move is. A French painter takes a town in a country France had conquered, carries it home in his memory, and turns it into a single available female body lying in the sun, a thing to be looked at and kept. That is the old logic art historians call Orientalism, the European habit of painting the colonized East as exotic, sensual, and there for the taking. Some scholars read this picture squarely inside it, arguing it treats North Africa the way it treats the woman, as a place to possess. Others argue Matisse is straining against that tradition, roughing the body up until it stops being a pretty object to consume. The painting will not settle the question for you, but the question is real, and the title, a colonized place repackaged as a souvenir, is where it starts.

One detail about Biskra has attached itself to this painting and refuses to let go. The local weavers of the region worked with indigo, the deep-blue plant dye, and indigo stains the hands: dyers in indigo towns famously go about with blue-stained arms and legs. Some writers connect that blue-stained skin straight to the blue body in the painting, as if Matisse had seen blue people in Biskra and painted what he saw.

It is a lovely idea and it is almost certainly too neat. The blue in the painting is not the color of anyone’s skin. It is shadow, the blue a sculptor would push into the hollows of a body to make it look carved. So the indigo story is a real and vivid fact about a real place, which some people like to read into the picture, not a proven recipe for it. The sure link between the painting and Biskra is the one word in the title. The rest is a memory of heat and a body, worked out in oil paint, in France, the following year.