Henri Matisse
Blue Nude (Souvenir de Biskra)
1907
Painted by Henri Matisse in 1907 after a trip to the oasis town of Biskra in Algeria, 'Blue Nude (Memory of Biskra)' uses heavily outlined planes of cool blue to model a reclining female nude — rejecting both natural colour and conventional spatial depth. Even more radical than his earlier Fauvist canvases, it extends flat colour toward sculptural form in ways that anticipate Cubism a year later. At the 1913 New York Armory Show the painting was so inflammatory that students at the Art Institute of Chicago burned it in effigy; today it is one of the signature works of the Baltimore Museum of Art.
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Image source: Wikimedia Commons