The magazines Mes Modèles, L’Humanité feminine and L’Étude académique primarily presented reproductions of photographs of mostly female nude models, which artists then often used for reference. At the same time, these magazines marked female bodies as erotic commodities. Matisse made use of such publications between 1906 and 1909 – mainly during his stay in Collioure in southern France, where he did not have access to any models. Hi created the Nu debout, très cambré with reference to the image shown here. He benefited from the poor quality of the halftone image, in which the grey tones were flattened through brightness gradations from black to white. Thus, the artist was able to model the sculpture by following the shadings on the body. Unlike in the case of a life model, halftone images can be regarded as surfaces of simplified shapes and contrasts of bright and dark, which aids the process of bodily distortion and, in Matisse's case, better facilitated his desire to distance himself from naturalistic representation.