Blue Nude (Souvenir de Biskra)

Blue Nude, Souvenir de Biskra, is an oil on canvas painting completed by Henri Matisse in 1907, showing a nude woman reclining in an imagined Mediterranean landscape recalling the Algerian town of Biskra. Painted in the Fauvist style, with the figure built from patches of blue shadow against a warm ochre ground, the work shocked audiences when shown at the 1907 Salon des Independants and again at the 1913 Armory Show in New York, where students in Chicago burned a copy of it in protest. It measures about 92 by 140 centimetres, hangs today in the Baltimore Museum of Art as part of the Cone Collection, and is credited with influencing Georges Braque and, through him, Pablo Picasso when he began his own major multi figure nude composition a few years later. This description is adapted from Wikipedia contributors under CC BY-SA 4.0; changes were made. https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/