Blue Nude (Souvenir of Biskra), Henri Matisse (French), 1907, oil on canvas, 92 × 140 cm, Baltimore Museum of Art, Baltimore
This is part three of a three part series on Primitivism, go here and here if you want to read the rest of the convoluted posts on the subject.
People took issue with Matisse’s Blue Nude (Souvenir of Biskra) from the start. In 1913, it was burnt in effigy at the Armory Show in Chicago, where it had toured from New York, because it offended the sensibilities of artists and critics. The painting echoes countless works depicting odalisques, courtesans and Venuses that came before, but the woman is intentionally ugly. Her pose is impossible and she is constructed from some incredibly harsh lines. Blue Nude is problematic today (and when I say problematic, I mean fucked up) due to its basis in the ‘Primitive’. As I have discussed earlier in this series, the decorative features of this painting (the flattened pictorial space and the bright colours) are based in the racist idea of the ‘Primitive’ in so far as the decorative nature of the painting is “simpler” and more “authentic” in the manner of ‘Primitive’ artifacts. Likewise based in the ‘Primitive’ are the exaggerated buttocks and hips of the woman, culled from statues from Africa and Oceania (a direct influence of Gauguin), then viewed as ethnographic artifacts of the monolithic ‘Primitive’ rather than individual works of art made by individual people from disparate cultures. Also problematic, and fundamentally tied to concepts of the ‘Primitive’ is the depiction of the woman as an odalisque. Within Primitivist art, such depictions have their roots in Orientalist depictions of women as odalisques in harems, objects of male desire uninhibited by the lack of intervention of “civilization” (of course such images can be taken back further to depictions of Venus and Eve, and throughout they implicitly carry the judgment of “whore”). Such depictions of women were subsumed into the ‘Primitive’ thanks to men’s conception of women as sexy irrational things (fundamentally primitive), and actually worked to gender the concept, erecting it and the cultures it represented as the uncivilized, savage, feminine counterpart to the rational, ordered, masculine Civilization of Europe. Because women were conceived of as primitive themselves, their intelligence was discounted, and their art, even though it was as smart (and not infrequently superior to) that of the male Avant-Gardes, was rendered unimportant. Even though artists of the early 20th century were oft in revolt against bourgeois Imperialist society, their work, in perpetuating these misogynistic and racist ideas, was complicit in Imperialism and Patriarchy, even as those very ideas served to transform art and art theory in Western society completely.