The pinup and the primitive: Eros and Africa in the sculpture of Henri Matisse (1906--1909)

In late 1906, soon after Henri Matisse acquired his first African sculpture, he began the first of several nudes based on erotic and ethnographic photographs. My dissertation examines the confluence of photography and African art in Matisse's sculpture between 1906 and 1909, but I focus as much on lessons appropriated from these two sources, as on ideological discontinuities with them. I demonstrate how commercial photography---the lesser known Other at the heart of Matisse's primitivist project---shaped the artist's reformulation of the tradition of the nude, and the categories of coherent race and gender it was meant to support.;While scholars have long known that Matisse made occasional use of nude photographs "reserved for artists," my dissertation uncovers previously unknown sources. It attempts to answer fundamental questions raised by Matisse's counter-intuitive combination of the pinup and the primitive: Why, for example, would an artist undertaking a self-proclaimed attack on many of the Ecole des Beaux-Arts ideals of the nude turn to reproductions paying such banal lip service to them? And why would Matisse combine these two-dimensional traces of "real" flesh with the very different three-dimensional language of African sculpture?;Matisse developed a primitive nude promptly after halftone technology had profoundly altered the economics of reproducing images of the human body. The inexpensive revues he consulted---Mes Modeles, L'Etude academique and the pseudo-scientific L'Humanite feminine (one of the first photo revues to transform ethnography into popular entertainment)---opened new avenues for selling sex and racial difference in early 20th-century Europe. A primary appeal of African sculpture was that it appeared to be the productive antithesis to this, that it represented an entirely different economy of the visual object.;Through a series of readings of Matisse's sculpture I suggest their photo-based primitivism was fueled by a fantasy of hybrid origins and of an incorruptible sexuality at odds with the commodified vision of the body in the revues. These readings are part of a larger re-evaluation of Matisse's critical engagement with the dominant narratives of European identity, an aspect of his pre-war work subsequently lost in his remaking as the most French of French modernists.