The Brooklyn Rail

Matisse and the Sea, a radiant exhibition recently on view at the St. Louis Art Museum, was, essentially, an in-context show focused on the French artist’s Bathers with a Turtle (1907-08). With paintings, sculpture, works on paper, ceramics, tapestries, and cut-outs by the Fauve artist as well as his friends and colleagues, it brilliantly illuminated the role that bodies of water played during Matisse’s half-century-plus career. Wherever you looked, you saw harbors, bays, gulfs, lagoons, the Mediterranean Sea, and the Atlantic and Pacific Oceans. But this was merely a taste of Matisse’s small-sized Fauve works, the views from the windows of his hotel rooms in Nice, and several great cut-outs. With additional loans, this captivating presentation easily could have been expanded into a blockbuster. And then, instead of merely eliciting oohs and aahs, it would have fundamentally altered how we perceive art by this incomparable Frenchman who died in 1954 at the age of eighty-four. No one had previously singled out this aspect of Matisse’s career. What a revelation this turned out to be! Now it’s obvious how paramount a role water played throughout the artist’s early, middle, and late period works. Was blue his favorite color? Perhaps.

The show opened with small oil paintings and watercolors Matisse executed on holiday in places like Corsica and Collioure, a fishing village on the Mediterranean coast of southern France. These early works from the opening years of the twentieth century have pronounced brushstrokes and unusual color juxtapositions. If you’ve read Hilary Spurling’s magisterial biography The Unknown Matisse, you know this was a carefree moment in Matisse’s life. As it is, the inventiveness of this work explains why, at the Salon d’Automne of 1905, a critic suggested such art was made by wild beasts (“fauves”). In St. Louis, Matisse’s initial burst of paintings was accompanied by a watercolor by André Derain, a colleague who spent time in Collioure with his friend, and a small bronze sculpture by Aristide Maillol, who lived nearby. The show included many African wood carvings that Matisse collected, a small canvas of three women bathers executed by Paul Cézanne from 1879-82 that the younger artist cherished, as well as a slightly larger group of male bathers by the same master.

Upon entering the temporary exhibition space, you saw Bathers with a Turtle in the distance. It beckoned. Along the way, there was intriguing comparative material. When you finally arrived at this large work—it’s almost 6 feet by 7 feet—you discovered that instead of assertive brushstrokes, Matisse allowed his painted-out thoughts to remain somewhat visible. For example, the standing central bather was moved and altered. From both her expression as well as the record of her former placement, this figure is an embodiment of anxiety and angst. As for the seated woman on the right, if this bather stood up, she’d be a towering amazon, much like the rightmost figure in the small Cézanne that Matisse owned. As for the kneeling bather on the left who’s viewed from the back, why is she feeding a turtle? Indeed, why is this tiny creature with a carapace included with this bevy of beauties? After all, the artist painted out the boats that were once sailing in the blue water but let the turtle remain.

What inspired Matisse to paint this scene? Some art historians, including Simon Kelly, the St. Louis curator who organized this show, suggest the Fauve was influenced by Pablo Picasso’s infamous Demoiselles d’Avignon, also from 1907. It’s possible, too, that he was challenged to create this work by André Derain’s Bathers, his dear friend’s canvas of three women submerged in a pool of water from 1907. Or he finally was ready to engage with his own Cézanne. In that case, he would have enlarged its dimensions and rethought the depiction of the three bathers. As it was, the Salon d’Automne of 1907 featured a retrospective of the art of Paul Cézanne, who had just died.

The surprise bonus of Matisse and the Sea was the paintings, drawings, cut-outs, and other works executed after Bathers with a Turtle was completed. On display, for example, were three hotel room interiors in Nice whose windows overlooked the Mediterranean, as well as a scene of the festival of flowers held on the beach. (In comparison, at an exhibition of works from the 1920s held at the National Gallery of Art in 1986–87, about three dozen canvases featured watery views glimpsed through windows.)

During the spring of 1930, Matisse spent two and a half months in Tahiti. There was a sketch of a boat docked along the tree-lined shore on view in St. Louis. Ironically, even though the artist sailed by ship to Tahiti from San Francisco and returned home to Nice on the vessel Ville de Verdun, bodies of water were conspicuously absent at that moment in his career. Then, sixteen years later, he designed Oceania, the Sea as well as Oceania, the Sky, which are both mural-sized screen prints on beige linen. These “reveries” feature silhouettes of starfish, jellyfish, seaweed, birds, stars in the sky, and other decorative flourishes crafted with a pair of scissors cutting into paper.

The show ends on a joyous note. You leave this temporary exhibition with a smile on your face having viewed a handful of glorious cut-outs. Composition Green Background and Composition with Red Cross, both of 1947, are bright, cheerful abstractions. And then, there’s Blue Nude, the Frog as well as Blue Nude I, both from 1952, which are compelling and majestic. Any number of other cut-outs related to the sea could have been added.

As for the opening sequence of Matisse and the Sea, the singular masterpiece Luxe, calme et Volupté (1904) would have expanded the thesis of the show along with the charming Open Window, Collioure (1905), the towering canvases Le Luxe I (1907) and Le Luxe II (1907–08), the riveting View of Notre Dame (1914), and the enchanting Bathers by a River (completed 1916–17). This picture of Matisse’s engagement with water would have been enhanced, too, by the inclusion of canvases executed in Paris such as Le Peintre dans son atelier (1916–17) and the Studio, Quai Saint-Michel (1916), where views of the Seine are seen through tall windows.

Matisse and the Sea was a compact, exquisite temporary exhibition with an astonishingly expansive, fertile subject.