The presence of this visitor from Paris ramps up the pressure. Anna and Stephane stop in every large city of the region, holding a casting call that is open to all.Ībout 50 teen girls in black undergarments and stiletto heels greet Anna and Stephane at every stop. Hababou says it’s the best way for him to find new prospects ahead of his competition. He represents the prestigious Marilyn agency in Paris. Her travelling companion, Stephane Hababou, watches the photos of would-be models scroll across the screen. Four times a year she crosses her native region by train searching for the next top models, the ones who will one day strut the catwalks of Paris or New York. She discovers new talents for the Noah Models agency in St. They are the result, she says, of years of mixed marriages by citizens from different republics of the former Soviet Union.Īnna is a scout. She wants to show her international visitor the many charms of Siberian beauties. 10019ĬHARLIE FINCH is co-author of Most Art Sucks: Five Years of Coagula (Smart Art Press).Anna Yuzhakova takes her laptop computer with her to the restaurant car. 11, 2010, at the Museum of Modern Art, 11 West 53rd Street, New York, N.Y. And one can also marvel that even Andy Warhol in his 'Ladies and Gentleman' series could not portray the bold ambiguities of drag as powerfully as Matisse does in Blue Nude. The trick of combining stark nude power with suggested androgyny is so perfect that one can almost forgive Picasso his resentment. Matisse was always great at adding frou-frou decoration to the edges of his paintings, a kind of lame distraction from his fundamentally erotic intentions, but what are his erotic intentions in Blue Nude? Plainly he enjoyed congress with his subject and he memorializes this by invisibly fusing elements of his own body (largeness, wideness, tallness) into hers! The charge of their coupling thus becomes far more dynamic than if he had actually included himself in the picture. The muscles of the arms are distinctly masculine, while a black boulder emerges from the zaftig, motherly ass like the sun on a cloudy morning. It is also screwed onto a thick neck like the cap on a pickle jar. How about those big feet, for starters? The head is a luminous thing of beauty which hallucinates back and forth between being that of an oriental girl and short-haired young boy. Blue Nude is a drag-queen picture disguised as the erotic memory of a woman.

You, see Matisse has painted n voluptuous nude of a woman which includes the physical elements of a man. When I discovered the surprising answer, I immediately fell in love with the painting. I confess, having seen the painting in person more than once, to being repelled by it and finally got around to asking why.

After all, it was burned in effigy when the 1913 Armory Show moved to Chicago, a place that should have appreciated what Carl Sandburg called 'broad shoulders' and other exaggerations of the flesh. In 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!īlue Nude, which Matisse took up in the aftermath of having a sculpture he was fiddling with shatter on him, seems to have angered a lot of people.

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