The sculpture that broke into a painting

This is the best story in the painting, and the core of it is documented, so it is worth telling carefully. Blue Nude is a painting that exists because a sculpture broke.

Back in his studio after Algeria, Matisse was not, at first, making a painting at all. He was modeling in clay, building up a small reclining figure, a nude woman lying on her side, working the form with his hands. Clay at that stage is wet and heavy and fragile, held up on an armature, and at some point the thing broke. (The exact way it broke is one of those details every account tells slightly differently, dropped, fallen, the stand giving way, so we will not pretend to a cinematic crash; the sure fact is that the clay broke before he had finished it.)

Most sculptors, faced with a broken figure, would have patched it or started the clay over. Matisse did something stranger and more revealing. Rather than repair it on the spot, he turned to oil paint and worked out the same figure on a canvas instead, solving in two dimensions the problem his hands had been solving in three. Blue Nude is that canvas. He did, eventually, go back and finish the sculpture: it survives as a small bronze called Reclining Nude I (Aurore) (in French, Nu couché I; “Aurore” means “dawn”), and if you stand the bronze and the painting side by side they are obviously the same body in the same twisted pose. The painting and the sculpture are siblings, born of the same broken lump of clay.

That origin is not a charming anecdote, it explains how the picture is actually made. Because this is a body Matisse first tried to build as a sculptor builds, by pushing mass around and shoving shadow into hollows with a thumb, he paints it the same way. The blue in Blue Nude is doing a sculptor’s job. It is modelingthe body, which is the painter’s trick of using light and shade to make a flat painted shape read as a rounded, three-dimensional thing. It is not describing the color of a woman; it is pushing the dark into the underside of a breast or the crook of an arm to make a painted shape bulge forward off the canvas like clay.

So when you hear the picture described as crude, or unfinished, or badly drawn (and in 1907 a great many people described it exactly that way), hold this in mind: it is a painting that is thinking like a sculpture. The heaviness is on purpose. The thick dark outline is on purpose. The body is built, not described. A man who could draw a graceful Salon nude in his sleep chose instead to make something with the blunt weight of a carved object, because that is what the broken clay had taught him to want. Two years earlier, the Fauves had been about pure color thrown at a landscape; here Matisse turns that same freedom onto a single body, and that shift, from colored places to a built, distorted figure, is the door out of Fauvism.