Henri Matisse: Nu bleu IV (1952)
The Blue Nudes are a series of painted female figure cut-outs stuck to paper and then mounted on canvas, completed by Henri Matisse in 1952. They are - no matter what fanatic Lawrentians may think - very lovely works and have added poignancy when one recalls that they were produced very late in his life when Matisse was not in the best of health, having undergone surgery for abdominal cancer ten years earlier.
Conventional painting and sculpture having become too physically demanding, Matisse turned in his final decade to a new medium and, with the help of his assistants, began creating artworks that defy genre, being neither paintings nor sculptures as such, but incorporating elements of both these disciplines.
Initially, the cut-outs were fairly modest in size and ambition, but eventually included large pieces of great complexity and if, at first, Matisse thought of them as subsidiary to his earlier work, by 1946 he had started to appreciate the possibilities inherent to the technique and to realise the new freedom working with scissors rather than brushes allowed him: An artist, he declared, must never be a prisoner of any style, of the past, or of himself ...
Blue Nude IV - shown above - took the elderly artist two weeks of cutting and arranging (and an entire sketchbook of preliminary studies) before it eventually satisfied him. The slightly awkward and uncomfortable looking pose of the figure was obviously one for which Matisse had a penchant, as it's similar to a number of nudes completed earlier in his career and can be traced back to Le bonheur de vivre (1905-06), one of the great masterpieces of modernism completed in his so-called Fauve period.
Mention must also be made of Nu bleu: Souvenir de Biskra, painted shortly afterwards:
This work scandalised the French public when first exhibited in 1907 and continued to provoke controversy six years later at the Armory Show in the United States, where it was burned in effigy - not least because of concerns about the racial origins of the female figure.
There's an obvious and much discussed primitivism and Orientalism in Matisse's work; African sculpture fascinated and inspired him as much as it did Picasso and other European artists at the beginning of the twentieth century. Disillusioned with Western culture and searching for new values and new ways of seeing the world, Matisse and his contemporaries attempted to merge the highly stylized treatment of the human figure found in African sculptures with painting styles derived from the post-Impressionist works of Cézanne and Gauguin. The resulting pictorial flatness and vivid use of colour helped to define early modernism.
Whilst these artists probably knew very little, if anything, of the history or meaning of the African sculptures they encountered - and probably didn't care all that much - they nevertheless recognized the magical and powerful aspects and adapted these to their own efforts to move beyond the naturalism that had defined Western art since the Renaissance.
Ultimately, one might suggest that the blueness in the works shown here signifies seductive Otherness and functions as a disguised form of blackness, revealing the fact that Matisse (like many white men) has something of a secret BGF ...
