Critical Archive of the Visual and Related Arts
Henri Matisse
French; 20th-century
St. Louis, MO: Saint Louis Art Museum
96%
Bathers with a Turtle. 1907-1908. Oil on canvas
This is among the greatest paintings in the world. Its greatness resides in the impossible duality of its three female figures: they are, on the one hand, perfectly bounded, indefectible, enclosed — whole worlds within each of themselves (not one of their glances or gestures indicates that they have knowledge of what exists beyond the picture they're so clearly trapped inside of); on the other hand, they are suffused with their environment, its greens and blues mingling with their fleshtones to pull them (if precariously) out from inside of themselves and onto the picture's surface, with all of its infinities of brushmark and shift of hue. It's like Matisse, more resolutely even than Cézanne before him, has balanced the two poles of painting, linearity and painterliness. Here we have figures in the fullness of their definition and paint in the fullness of its reality, with no compromises. Even in Cézanne there is usually a sense that all of his individuated strokes are working towards the unity of the image overall, which itself is a sort of subordination. Here, however, everything is simply flux — immanence. (Look at how the woman at left sits without sitting on anything!) And I haven't even mentioned the crop of yellow hair, the presage of Rothko in the stacked rectangles, the immaculate rhythm of the figures' placement, the poetry of that worthless turtle. (TFS, 2025)
Minneapolis, MN: Minneapolis Institute of Art
73%
Three Bathers. 1907. Oil on canvas
This is an early version of a larger painting of bathers that's at the Saint Louis Art Museum, which is among the greatest things Matisse ever made. This first stab at the theme is nice, but it's a bit overfull and undirected. The question to ask is: what problems does this painting pose that the masterpiece in St. Louis ends up resolving? One: the hardline Van Gogh bounding of the figures in this earlier piece gives what's going on around them some license to frolic much more than it should; the later painting is quieter and its figures are made literally to blend with their milieu. Yet the vitality of their modeling, despite how the paint keeps pushing in and out of their bodies, has somehow not been compromised even a skosh. Two: the colors here are a failure, not because they're too vibrant or nonlocal, but because they detract in their vibrancy from the austere arrangement of the figures; the palette of the later painting is honed and the bathers are made to seem even more isolated in their shared environment. Three: the oblique relationship in this painting between the girls and their setting allows for the inclusion of all those ships, as well as that busy waver in the teal/pink sky; all this staffage is concentrated into the figure of a lone turtle in the later painting, and is thereby transformed from picture-filling devices into pure poetry. This earlier painting is not exactly anything to sneeze at, but it sort of reaches more than it should. (TFS, 2025)
Brunswick, ME: Bowdoin College Museum of Art
45%
Vénitienne (en buste). 1921. Oil on canvas
The quick snorts of paint that make up the sitter's arms are nice, and so are those vertical strips in the background, which imply that there's depth to this scene without actually defining it. But the disconnect between the verisimilitude of the face and the sketchiness of the body does not come off, probably because there's not enough abstractness to make the formal reductions seem significant on their own terms, rather than instrumental. That boutonnière, for instance, could have been painted by Romney or any other fast-handed Western painter. There is charm to this picture, but it's a less than minor Matisse. (TFS, 2025)