Description
In 1913, outraged by Matisse's painterly violations of the female body, students of the Art Institute of Chicago found him guilty of artistic murder and proceeded to burn in effigy three of his works, including the Blue Nude of 1907. Since that time, Matisse's paintings of women have remained a source of deep controversy, feminist critics finding them an assertion of virilty whilst others have fallen back on purely formalist defences of the artist's disinterested paint.
