/Daily Fix

Sex, Notes, and Miscellany

Updated Daily-ish.

/Henri Matisse

Blue Nude

"Something happened to artists at the dawn of the 20th century. They started to have sex. If you look at a nude by Matisse, and the painting in my head is his Blue Nude (Souvinir de Biskra) (1907), and compare it with a late Victorian painting such as JW Waterhouse's Hylas and the Nymphs (1896), one of the things that strikes you is surely how much healthier, abundant, and fulfilled Matisse is, sexually. His Blue Nude is a fully, confidently carnal painting. By contrast, the Waterhouse is a perverse fantasy, a lubricious idyll, neurotic, bizarre, solitary."

- Jonathan Jones

Current

Henri Matisse, Blue Nude (1907)
J.W. Waterhouse, Hylas and the Nymphs (1896)

/Daily Fix

Sex, Notes, and Miscellany

/Henri Matisse

Blue Nude

Recent articles