"In 1906, soon after Matisse acquired his first African sculpture, he began the first of his nudes based on erotic and ethnographic photographs. This reading of Matisse's early sculpture examines the artist's appropriations from two seemingly disparate visions of the body: commercial nude photography and African sculpture. Why would Matisse synthesize mechanically made traces of actual flesh with the hand-carved abstractions of Pende, Senufo, Baga,...