In 1913, outraged by Henri Matisse's painterly violations of the female body, students of the School of the Art Institute of Chicago found him guilty of "artistic murder" and "rapine" 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.

In Pleasuring Painting, John Elderfield skillfully picks his way through the knotty politics of painterly pleasure, tracing the development of Matisse's feminine representations from Carmelina of 1903/4 through to the odalisques of the Nice period of the 1920s, offering a startling reinterpretation of some of the artist's best-known works.

The author shows that Matisse was not, as his legend suggests, simply a painter of quintessentially male pleasures, but rather one who used his female models as a means of self-analysis and identification.