An Imprint of Time: Matisse's Bather's with a Turtle

Working beneath the guise of traditional subject matter, Matisse’s large-scale 71.5 x 87 inch oil painting Bathers with a Turtle, 1907-08 (Figure 1) embodies a newly emerging and drastic departure from a conventional bather landscape. Dubbed as a “degenerate” piece during the rise of the Nazis in Germany, the reception and political context of this large-scale work have established its significance within Matisse’s oeuvre. Despite these broader influences, these bathers are removed from all society and modernity. While this was a common idea in more traditional Arcadian landscapes, Bathers with a Turtle isolates the bathers from the tropes of the motif itself. The stylistic treatment of these strange, lumpy bodies depart from the idealized beauty of a classical nude, and the simplified background give the painting a surreal vibe that reflect Matisse’s stylistic revisions and development as a painter during the early twentieth century.

Figure 2. Paul Cézanne, Three Bathers, 1879-1882.

Oil on canvas, 21.7 x 20.5 in

Musée du Petit Palais, Paris.

One can begin to understand such an enigmatic piece through the works that informed Matisse’s oeuvre, especially those of his immediate predecessor, the French Post-Impressionist Paul Cézanne. Matisse took many cues from Cézanne, and believed deeply in Cézanne’s genius; he would constantly remind his contemporaries that “Cézanne is the master of us all.”[1] The composition of the human bodies and the harmonies between the colors of the landscape in Bathers with a Turtle can be traced back to Cézanne’s bather pieces, including his painting Three Bathers (1890-91, Figure 2) which Matisse kept in his studio for most of his life.[2] Matisse drew from Cézanne’s highly structured and planned out paintings in his own work, and also echoes the Post-Impressionist’s use of the analogous colors blue and green in the color juxtaposition in Bathers with a Turtle. These harmonies create a setting with great emotional impact in both paintings, and these modern artists have meticulously crathe bathers in Matisse and Cézanne’s pieces interact in peaceful scenes that have been highly structured and calculated by these modern artists.

However, Bathers with a Turtle transcends many of the conventions of Cézanne and his other predecessors. Matisse eliminates any evocation of a physical landscape. Rather, the three human figures seem to exist in a turquoise and steel blue vacuum that is only remotely evokes the presence of several horizon lines, and that prevents the construction of realistic depth by its viewers. What remains after this reduction of the natural landscape is the profoundly affective power of the colors themselves that creates a still environment that borders on the surreal. The figures of the bathers are thus amplified by the backdrop and by their large scale to create a well ordered, clearly focused composition. The emphasis on the turtle within the composition portrays an intimate dynamic between the human figure and nature that bypasses the traditional balance between nature and humanity found in bather paintings such as Cézanne’s Three Bathers (Figure 2). The viewer thus becomes a privileged spectator into this quiet, powerful moment, as he or she witnesses the coming together of these two forces in such an intimate and affective environment.

With its curious aesthetic, Bathers with a Turtle can be seen as an affirmation of Matisse’s personal creative philosophy. The French painter had exhibited at the 1905 Paris Salon d’Automne along with painters like André Derain, Georges Rouault, and Jean Puy. In response to the wild and untamed aesthetic of Matisse’s exhibited work, the critic Louis Vauxcelles had deemed Matisse a “Fauvist” or “wild beast” artist.[3] This landmark exhibition brought together the styles of these modernist painters into a recognizable movement, but also caused Matisse to reflect upon his work and to assert the careful planning, deliberateness, and personal expression of his paintings as something beyond the undomesticated fauvist style.[4] 1908 thus presents a pivotal moment in Matisse’s career in painting, as he defended his work and his artistic process in retrospect. He was in the midst of projecting his own feelings and expressions onto his painting style in a calculated and contemplative manner, and to “reach a state of condensation of sensations” in his paintings.[5] Bathers with a Turtle asserts his philosophy: the varying heights of the figures and the color lines coincide harmoniously, and the centralization of the composition is blatantly and meticulously construed. While seemingly abbreviated and remiss, the colors and the texture of his brushwork create the surreal environment of the painting.

To Matisse, painting was also a process that was constantly being reworked and updated over time.[6] Bathers with a Turtle also bears evidence of this assertion, as the central figure has been modified and moved to its position farther to the right. Matisse’s frenetic brushstrokes around the central figure both reveal and conceal the previous outline of the body, and showcase his emphasis on the dynamic and deliberate painting process that he felt was overlooked at the 1905 Salon d’Automne.

Figure 3. Pablo Picasso, Les Demoiselles D'Avignon, 1907

Oil on canvas, 96 x 92 in.

Musuem of Modern Art, New York.

Matisse also re-conceptualizes and asserts his approach to painting by referencing Pablo Picasso’s Les Demoiselles D’Avignon (1907, Figure 3). Matisse had seen the Spanish artist’s seminal work in his studio in the fall of 1908, and Les Demoiselles D’Avignon greatly influenced the composition and the treatment of the subject matter in Bathers with a Turtle.[7] Both artists orient the bodies of their nudes around a central point – the turtle or a bowl of fruit in Demoiselles – and work with the modernist concept of primitivism, or the appropriation of so-called “primitive,” non-western depictions of the figure. Picasso and Matisse’s depiction of the women’s faces and geometric, hyper-sexualized bodies reflect the inspiration of this “primitive” art.

Matisse’s progressive attitudes towards the future of painting existed within a society that nevertheless dwelled on artistic tradition, and thus Matisse points out that “a painter who addresses the public not just in order to present his works but to reveal some of his ideas on the art of painting, exposes himself[8]” to the trained and judging gaze of its public. Bathers with a Turtle was received well by patrons of modern artists, including Karl Ernst Osthaus, the founder of the historic Folkwang Museum in Germany, yet was despised by Adolf Hitler’s regime and was sold to collector Joseph Pulitzer in the Degenerate Art Auctions before World War II.[9] Art that conflates, remixes, and moves forward, Matisse implies, exposes the artist’s work to such polarizing critique, and it is in this way that Bathers with a Turtle becomes both an “imprint of [its] time[10]” while simultaneously becoming a timeless symbol of modernity through the progression of the twentieth century.