The ugliest thing at the Indépendants

In the spring of 1907, around March, Matisse hung the new picture at the Salon des Indépendants in Paris, the big jury-free, prize-free annual show where any artist could exhibit by paying a fee, the open exhibition the avant-garde used to put its rawest work in front of the public. And the public recoiled. The reaction was not bafflement; it was something closer to disgust. The painting was read as gratuitously ugly, savage, brutal, unfinished, a deliberate insult, a competent painter throwing away everything that made a nude beautiful in order to shock.

It helps to remember what a Salon nude was supposed to be in 1907. It was supposed to be smooth, idealized, graceful, flattering, a beautiful woman painted beautifully, with every edge softened and every shadow tucked away, a body arranged to please the (overwhelmingly male) viewer who paid to look. That was the whole long tradition of the academic nude, and audiences read it almost without thinking. Matisse’s nude was the opposite of all of it: a heavy, twisted, ungainly body, drawn around with a thick black line, modeled in blunt blue shadow, lying on grass that was the wrong color, under a flat cardboard palm. To a viewer trained on the academic nude it did not look like a failed attempt at beauty. It looked like an attack on beauty, and it was taken personally.

The line that has stuck to the painting ever since came from Louis Vauxcelles (pronounced “voh-SELL”), the Paris critic with a real gift for the wounding phrase: he is the same man who, two years earlier, had christened Matisse and his circle the Fauves, the “wild beasts,” and who would later hand Cubism its name too. Faced with the Blue Nude, he reached for ridicule, and his jeer fastened on exactly the three things a hostile eye saw first: that the woman was ugly, that she was stretched out on blue grass, and that the whole thing sat under palm trees. (The exact wording of his line varies from translation to translation, so take that as the gist of his sneer rather than a quotation carved in stone. The contempt is not in doubt; only the precise syllables are.) The detail to notice is that his insults were accurate. There is a frankly ugly-on-purpose body. The grass is blue. There isa flat palm. He named the picture’s real features and meant every one as a crime. Matisse had simply decided those features were not crimes.

And that is the thing about the 1907 scandal: the ugliness was the point, not an accident. Matisse was not failing to paint a pretty nude. He was deliberately refusing to, building a body out of weight and blue shadow and a hard outline because that, and not prettiness, was what he was after. The Salon read a refusal as an incompetence, and a deliberate provocation as a tantrum. Six years later, across an ocean, a crowd of Chicago students would read it exactly the same way, and act on it.