I made Blue Nude over the summer of 2025 for a course called Modern and Contemporary Art. Along with learning about all of the significant artists, movements, and innovations from the 1850s to the present, students were tasked with pulling out quotes and images we found interesting in the lectures and readings. This ultimately culminated in students creating an artwork that responded to the material we had learned throughout the course, as well as a description and analysis of the piece, its meaning, and how it pulls from the source material. Blue Nude and the accompanying written text is my final project from this course.
See Blue Nude here!
The image Blue Nude is primarily black and white with a reclined figure within a large grey rectangle taking up most of the white background. The figure reaches one arm up to rest on the head of dark curly hair while the other arm props up their body. The legs are bent so that the thighs sit perpendicular to the horizontal body and the calves continue to be mostly parallel. The figure mainly faces the viewer, but the legs are almost seen from a profile view, obscuring the genitals.
The only color in the piece are four dark blue-grey rectangles. One rectangle is on the left side, covering the face and chest of the figure, while the other three sit in the upper right corner. These blue-grey rectangles overlap with the large grey rectangle in which the figure reclines. They enclose body parts–the back of a head, a reaching arm, and a wide eye–that conform in some places to the rectangular boundaries and in others seem to break out or overlap. Similarly the main figure’s elbow extends above the large grey rectangle while the knee and fingers are cut off at the rectangle’s bottom edge.
The fragmented back of the head seems to look over their shoulder towards the viewer, giving a silhouette of the nose, lips, and chin, but obscuring where the eyes might be with the hair. The arm reaches from the top right corner of both the blue rectangle it sits inside, and the top right corner of the entire image. The wrist is bent and the fingers are splayed outside of the blue rectangle. The eye has a dark iris and pupil interrupted by a thin light ring.
Three main elements within the piece are shape, color, and value. Shape shows up in the various rectangles as well as in the more rounded shapes of the body. Color shows up as a main principle because of the sparing use of it. The blue-grey, though not highly saturated, stands out from the greyscale of the rest of the image. Value is especially important in the piece because of the lack of color. Darker and lighter values define the shape of the body and body parts. The silhouette of the figure is clear because of how the skin appears darker than the background rectangle which is in turn darker than the white of the background. The darkest parts of the piece are the hair, the iris, and pupil of the figure while the lightest parts are the sclera of the eye, the white ring in the eye, and the background. The blue is also noticeably darker than most of the surrounding gray.
Three principles that are significant to the piece are rhythm, contrast, and scale. Rhythm exists in the repetition of rectangles, body parts, and color. The use of the repeated rectangles brings cohesion to the entire piece–a unifying element. The repetition of the body parts is notable in that it doesn’t adhere to the notions of how bodies are typically built. There is only one figure in the image, but the image also has three arms. Rhythm in the color shows up in a similar way as the rhythm of the rectangular shapes, instances of color on both the left and right of the image, visually connecting the two. Contrast shows up primarily within the use of colors. The blue contrasts with the grey, but also notably contrasts with the viewer’s notion of blue, as it is quite desaturated. Contrast also exists between the different types of shapes. The sharp edges of the rectangles contrast with the organic shape of the body as well as with the circular shapes within the eye. Scale can be seen through the different sizes of rectangles as well as the sizes of body parts. The fragmented head and arm seem to be slightly larger than they would be on the figure, but most striking is the size of the eye, which is much larger than it would appear on the figure and comparable in size to the head.
The theme I chose to follow throughout the duration of the class was “figure.” I saw the idea of bodies in art as an interesting theme with many avenues to follow, including objectification, nudity, and identity. As I was creating this piece, I wanted to pull on and connect those many strings, but through my own contemporary lens. My work extends the theme of figure by using it and all of the ideas of objectification, nudity, and identity in order to talk specifically about non-binary gender. There are artists who play with gender in interesting ways but as a person who is neither of the binary genders that have been established throughout a huge portion of art history, as well as someone continually living in a time where sex and gender are equated, I feel as though I have a lot to say.
Both the title and the pose of the nude were pulled from Henri Matisse’s Blue Nude (Memory of Biskra) (1907). The pose was very unnatural, requiring me to prop up my hips and move my upper body forward out of line with my legs to achieve it. Despite all of this, my body continued to fold and bend in ways that the figure in Matisse’s work didn’t. This speaks on how exaggerated the pose was, which plays into ideas of objectification and using figures as design. When talking about this work, Matisse explained that he was not creating a woman, but rather a picture. In saying that, he reduces the pictured figure to their body, removing their identity and autonomy.
Though it is important to look at Matisse’s image and quote through the lens of objectification, I think it can be further complicated by introducing ideas of gender. Matisse says he is not creating a woman while simultaneously painting a figure with feminine traits. When I put myself in the position of Matisse’s figure, I hope to convey that I am not a woman.
Lorna Simpson’s You’re Fine (1988) is an incredible commentary on the objectification of women that I wanted to emulate in my piece. I chose to use photography as my medium because of this work and many other feminist works, as well as incorporating some of the rectangular design elements in my own work, but the main ideas I wanted to pull from the work were those of objectification.
One of the main strategies Simpson uses to convey objectification is through fragmentation. She hides the figure’s face and uses medical language to reduce the figure to their body. These fragments of a body are not more of the sum of their parts–the fragments add up to a body, not a person. I hoped to use that imagery and message in my own piece, hiding the face and literally fragmenting the body. But the idea of objectification becomes more complicated when gender is added to the equation.
Even though we are working to break down these ideas, sex and sexual characteristics continue to be equated with gender. A person being reduced to their body can feel even more objectifying and dehumanizing when the body directly contradicts the identity.
As I was working to conceptualize this piece, I was looking at the quote “[art is] the application of each individual artist’s own personal faculties to the ideas and themes of the times in which he lives” (Gustave Courbet, “Letter to Young Artists”). I feel as though my piece responds to this quote by doing exactly as it says: applying my identity, beliefs, and skills in order to respond to the present day. I metaphorically insert myself into the piece when I put together ideas and create a piece, but for this piece, I have literally inserted myself into the piece. I am also responding to current ideas of gender and sex. A piece like this couldn’t have been made in Courbet’s time not only because of the technological advances, but because our societies were different.
Looking at Claes Oldenburg’s quote “I am for an art that dispenses with the human…” (Claes Oldenburg, “I Am For an Art”), I couldn’t help but connect it to Matisse. I understood it as saying art is literally not human. For all we pour into art, art is not emotions, it is not identity, and it is not human. Art does not have a sex. Art does not have a gender. Art is inherently objectifying.
In making this piece, I used the blue rectangles because I wanted to connect the eyes, hand, and back of the head to specifically the face and chest of the figure. The face feels humanizing while the chest feels indicative of sex and I wanted to remove both to replace them in the mind of the viewer with these fragmented parts. The eyes call attention to how much we feel entitled to know what is under a shirt or in someone’s pants as well as mimic the round shape of the breasts in Matisse’s image. The hand similarly represents the sexualization (both in terms of arousal and gender) of the chest. The back of the head was an idea pulled directly from Simpson’s work, intended to remove the identity of the figure.
I intend for this piece to somewhat confuse the viewer. I want them to see this as a body with a gender, and then realize that all of the “concrete” signifiers are not there. The figure is posing as a female nude, but the chest is covered by a completely flat surface–and flat chests are associated with men. The viewer might feel as though they know the sex through the shape of the hips or the hands or the legs, but even in cis individuals, sex can be hard to determine.
The “Blue” part of Blue Nude is significant in my piece because of its connection to Matisse’s work, the melancholic meaning of the word, as well as its association with gender. In our current society, blue is a masculine color. The essential “gender telling” parts of the figure are covered in blue. I connect it in my mind both to the idea that all sexism, transphobia, homophobia and the like can all be traced back to misogyny, as well as the idea of clothes as a representation of gender. If you “recognize” a female body under masculine clothing, how do you understand that person’s gender? What about vice versa?
The figure in my Blue Nude is not blue. None of the body parts are blue in color. But I think the nude is blue. Emotionally. Blue because they are reduced to the body they inhabit, and are not liberated by it.