#nudes

A Russian businessman ordered this for the staircase of his Moscow house, along with a second panel to hang near it. Supposedly he got nervous about all the bare bodies, pulled out, then changed his mind and took them anyway.

The title comes from a line in a Baudelaire poem, apparently — luxury, calm, pleasure. He'd spent a summer down on the Mediterranean coast with a painter who worked entirely in separate little dots, and it looks like he tried the method on for size here before heading off somewhere else with it.

This came near the end of his life — the 1918 flu got him at twenty-eight, a few days after it got his wife. Early on he'd done a stretch in jail over drawings somebody decided were indecent, and from what I can find that hung over him for years afterwards.

It's the story where the lover only ever comes at night and she's forbidden to know who he is. Most painters gave her a beautiful boy; here, according to the museum, he's deliberately an awkward teenager very pleased with himself, taken partly from an old Greek poem that calls him a mean-spirited brat. Painted in exile in Brussels, after the empire he'd spent years working for collapsed.

When this first went up in public the crowd was genuinely angry about it — the colours, mostly, from what I've read. Hard to picture now, people furious at a painting of a picnic. The write-ups I found call it one of the starting points of modern painting.