ABSTRACT
in the painting “the painter and his Model” (1917), Henri Matisse represents an artist at work in the privileged space of modern art, the studio. Not a documentary image of Matisses actual working space on the Quai St Michel in Paris, it symbolically represents the ideological conditions in which modern art was created—by the painter in the studio. The painter, Matisse, is a man, as is the painter he symbolizes. More often the man/artist is clothed, while the model, prototypically a woman, is naked, and often supine in some gracelessly uncomfortable posture. Matisse’s reversal juxtaposes a caucasian flesh-coloured and possibly nude artist to the crumpled mess of faceless costume in the armchair in the corner, his female model. Masculine nudity, associated with Apollonian intelligence and creativity, signifies a mastering and active body, and strips the artist of any specific social or historical signs other than the white masculinity with which he is clothed because he is the artist. The body is not anatomically sexed; cultural connotations provide its gender through the assimilation of the term artist to man.
