Museum curators the globe over must regard the art of Henri Matisse as the gift that keeps on giving. Over the past several years, it seems as if not a season passes without the appearance of a new Matisse-related show—one of the notable latest being the Metropolitan Museum of Art’s Vertigo of Color exhibition, which detailed the period when Matisse, in the company of fellow artist André Derain, discovered the use of vivid color, changing his art and all art at once. Then again, more power to the curators: for his lively compositions and sparkling hues alone make Matisse one of the most popular artists in the world.
The latest entry is Matisse and the Sea currently on view at the Saint Louis Art Museum. The show—which takes in approximately seventy-five works of art, ranging from paintings and sculptures to drawings, textiles, and paper cutouts—is, like the Met’s, an examination of Matisse’s artistry, but on a broader scale.
The SLAM curators tackle their subject chronologically. All his career, Matisse had an affinity for the water, and he consistently used his experimentations with light, color, and the coastline to refine his work. We begin with him in the late nineteenth century in seaside Brittany, painting impressionistic water- and landscapes, and then move on to his time in southern France on the Mediterranean with Derain. Later, visitors are taken to Polynesia, where the aquatic flora and fauna helped inspire the paper cutout abstractions he created toward the end of his life, following painful surgery for cancer.
The centerpiece of the exhibition, and one of Matisse’s most famous paintings: SLAMs’s own Bathers with a Turtle. Painted between 1907 and 1908 and reworked many times, the canvas is seminal to Matisse’s body of work, the curators argue, marking the watershed moment when Matisse radically simplified his paintings on the road to pure abstraction.
Matisse and the Sea • Saint Louis Art Museum • to May 12 • slam.org
