Henri Matisse
Blue Nude (Memory of Biskra)
1907
Baltimore Museum of ArtIn his New Yorker review of the Henri Matisse exhibition currently on view at the Museum of Modern Art, Peter Schjeldahl confesses a curmudgeonly affection for Blue Nude (Memories of Biskra), the 1907 painting featured in the show, observing that the work infuriated Picasso, who remarked churlishly that Matisse could “either paint a nude or do a design, he can’t do both,” a delicious bit of trapped spite from the one painter who tried to have it all in Cubism and beyond!