A body modeled in blue

Stand in front of it. The painting is landscape format, about three feet tall by four and a half feet wide, wider than it is high, and almost the whole of that width is given over to a single reclining body. There is no room, no furniture, no story, no other figure. One woman, lying on her side, fills the canvas nearly corner to corner, with a strip of vegetation and a stylized plant behind her. Everything the picture has to say it says through that one body and the few flat bands of color around it.

Find her. Her head is up at the left, tipped back, with one arm bent up and around behind it so the elbow points to the upper-left corner. From there your eye travels right, along the body, and this is where the picture does the thing that makes it strange. She is lying on her side, which should mean you see one continuous profile of a body, hip and shoulder in a single plane. But her torso wrenches. The chest and breasts twist up and toward you, turning to face out of the canvas, while the hips and buttocks stay rolled away, turned to the back. So in one body, read left to right, you are somehow seeing the front of her (the twisted-up chest) and the back of her (the rolled-away hip) at the same time. No real person can hold that pose. It is a long, impossible S-curve of a spine, and it is exactly the twist Matisse had been pushing around in wet clay. Once you see the wrench, you cannot unsee it: the woman is turning two ways at once, and the whole body has the quality of something modeled and revolved in the hand rather than glimpsed across a studio.

Now the blue, because the painting is named for it. The title makes you expect a blue woman. She is not blue. Her body is a warm, ruddy, pinkish flesh color. The blue is the shadow. Look along the underside of the torso, the far breast, the crook of that bent arm, the hollows where the body folds, and you will find that every shaded place, every spot that would simply be a darker flesh-tone in an ordinary nude, Matisse has painted a frank, unmixed blue. He is using blue the way a sculptor uses shadow, packing it into the hollows to make the lit parts bulge forward. That is why a flat painting reads as something with real weight: the blue does the modeling. And here is the move that ties the whole picture together: the same blue runs straight out of the body and into the grass. The shadow under her and the ground she lies on are the same blue paint, so the figure does not sit cleanly in front of a background. She is welded to it. Body and oasis are made of one color.

Let your eye go to the center of the canvas, to the hip and buttock. This is the high point of the whole composition, the body’s great upward curve, swelling up larger than anything else in the picture. It is exaggerated on purpose, pushed past anatomy into pure swelling shape. And ringing the entire figure, head to feet, is a thick, dark, deliberate contour line, a drawn outline you are absolutely meant to see. A Salon nude of 1907 would have hidden every edge in soft blended shadow so the body seemed to melt into air; that smooth invisibility was what “finished” meant. Matisse threw it out. He drew a heavy line around his nude like a child or a carver would, and let it show. Get close and you can see how little he hid the labor: the paint is laid on in visible, dragging strokes, the blue grass scrubbed in with a loaded brush, the dark contour pulled around the hip in one rough, ropy band you can almost feel the bristles in. Then look from the curve of the buttock up to the hollow under the palm fronds behind her: the two curves rhyme. The shape of her body is answered by the shape of the plant. The picture is built out of a few repeated curves bounced between the woman and the oasis.

Finally, the setting, which is barely a setting at all. Behind her, at the upper right, stands a single stylized palm or palmette, its fronds curling over, and beneath and around her runs a band of vegetation, the blue grass the hostile critics could not get past. That is the entire Biskra in this Souvenir de Biskra: one plant and a strip of blue ground. It is not a desert you could walk into. It is flat, frontal, decorative, a couple of color-bands standing in for a remembered country. And the colors there are not new colors; they are the body’s colors thrown backward into the plant. Red turns up in the palm stem and again in her lips and nipples. Pink sits in her flesh and again at the base of the palm. Blue is in her shadows and in the grass. Step back and the whole thing reads as one built surface of a handful of colors, traded back and forth between a woman and an oasis until you cannot say where one stops and the other starts. That, and not any blue skin, is what the title is really pointing at: a body and a memory, painted out of the same paint.