Manhã de Setembro

Paul Chabas showed this nude at dawn at the Paris Salon in 1912 and it won a medal of honour, with no fuss at all. The uproar came later, and across an ocean. In 1913 in New York, Anthony Comstock, who ran the Society for the Suppression of Vice, saw a print of it in a shop window and demanded it be pulled as indecent. Dealers in New York and Chicago were dragged into indecency cases over it. The campaign did exactly what campaigns like that tend to do: it made the picture famous, and reproductions sold by the thousands. The painting itself is quiet, a young woman shivering slightly in shallow water in the morning light. It was given anonymously to the Metropolitan Museum in 1957.