In recent years Blue Nude was included in 2007’s “Matisse: Painter as Sculptor,” which was co-organized by Baltimore, the Dallas Museum of Art and the Nasher Sculpture Center and which also traveled to SFMOMA. The show’s curatorial team included Blue Nude and its sister sculpture Reclining Nude (Aurora) (1907) to show how Matisse’s sculpture informed his painting, and vice versa. In the just-closed “Radical Invention: 1913-17,” co-organized by the Art Institute of Chicago and the Museum of Modern Art, Blue Nude was a show-stealing stage-setter, one of a handful of paintings that gave introduced the show and that gave testimony about where Matisse had been before he entered his near-cubist period.