Matisse's Bathers with a Turtle

Author(s): Yve-Alain Bois

Source: Bulletin (St. Louis Art Museum), New Series, Vol. 22, No. 3, Henri Matisse: Bathers
with a Turtle (Fall 1998), pp. 8-19
Published by: St. Louis Art Museum
Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/40716226
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Matisse's Bathers with a Turtle
by Yve-Alain Bois

Andiswhat
Let's begin with the blonde figure. What about the others? Can we say, for sure, th
the sense
even the
of her arm's gesture as bracketed between if they
two don't try to relate to the turtle, they a
curious
points of entry into the picture, namely enough at least to look at it? Their eyes are
her yellow
among
hair (the sharpest color contrast) and the the inno-
turtle, most detailed features of the canvas,
cent and cartoonlike, headed toward especially
her hand? those
The of the central nude, thinly brushed
in black over
purpose of the crouched pose and the extended arm dry pigment (the same kind of curso
and unhesitating
is obvious: the giant is feeding the reptile, interacting drawing traces the attributes of t
turtleto
with it in one of the very few ways available over a patch of diluted brown). Yet we can't
humans.
decide
But if feeding the creature is at stake, why thesquat-
is the direction of their gaze. That of the stand
ter so disengaged from her task, as if hunchback seems directed nowhere in particular,- t
accomplishing
sitter's
it over the shoulder, as if the turtle itself wereseems to point straight down, towards the
almost
placed behind her? Eliding the figure'schildishly curling at the end of her huge feet, whi
neck, Matisse
gives us only the bright casque of her she cannot
hair whosesee. It is tempting to say that both of th
are peeping
dwarfed aspect indicates that she's turning at the beast. It would perhaps make sen
her face
to say the
away. She does not look at the mute animal, this, but not, if I am right, a sense that Mati
himself would have welcomed. For he refrained fro
focal point from which the painting takes its name.
such a unifying convention.
Not a very auspicious way to start a relationship.

Henri Matisse
Bathers with a Turtle, 1908
Oil on canvas, 179.1 x 220.3 cm.
The Saint Louis Art Museum
Gift of Mr. and Mrs. Joseph
Pulitzer, Jr. 24:1964

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 Figure 1.1 Henri Matisse, Le Luxe (I), (Le luxe,
esquisse), Collioure, 1907. Oil on canvas, 210 x 138
cm. Musée national d'art moderne, Centre Georges
Pompidou, Paris
The directionless gaze is a feature common enough in
Matisse's art before Bathers with a Turtle, especially in
his multifigure canvases. Consider Le Luxe I (Figure 1.1)
and Le Luxe II (Figure 1.2) for example, from the crop
of pictures that immediately precedes the St. Louis
canvas: it is hard to say exactly what, in either version,
the erect nude is looking at. It could be argued that
this imprecision is only a side effect of Matisse's ellip-
tical mode of notation - that, since the facial features
are being jotted down in shorthand, it would be silly
to put much weight on their lack of definition. But
this argument does not hold: from Luxe I to Luxe II,
the disconnectedness of the towering figure's gaze
grows more flagrant precisely because the attributes
of her eyes become more refined (a pupil, usually one
of the first features to be elided in an abbreviative
anatomy, even makes a conspicuous return). The same
holds for the standing nude in Bathers with a Turtle-, no
pupil here, but the emptiness of her gaze is not defined
by any lack of finish. This is particularly striking if
we compare her eyes with her other facial traits: the
dark patch of the ocular cavity onto which they are
drawn (the dividing wall of the nose line has been
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Figure 1.2 Henri Matisse, Le luxe (II), Collioure or
Paris, 1907-08? Casein on canvas, 209.5 x 138 cm.
Statens Museum for Kunst, Copenhagen, J. Rump
Collection
slighted, something unusual for Matisse who likes to
extend it to the curve of an eyebrow - here, the eye-
brows are omitted altogether),- the huge shapeless
ear, placed so high, its hollow aligned with the eyes,-
the melting cheeks,- the nose doubly flattened, first
by light, and then by a bottom contour that has a
life of its own,- the whole area of the mouth in the
shade. Though her black circumflexed eyes are firmly
in place, we do not know what she sees.
The face of the sitter is more solid,- the applelike
cheek, whose roundness is accentuated by the abridg-
ment of the chin and by a non-anatomical line drawn
between the corner of the nose and the upper lip, has
something of a wooden mannequin. Her single eye
is drawn more swiftly than those of her neighbor, but
her whole pose confirms her self-absorption, her lack
of interest in the slow movement of the turtle. She's
one big stiffened "S" (90° angles of her right knee and
of her left elbow, straight line of the right leg). Coiling
into herself, almost in lévitation, she's remote in her
own thoughts, as if oblivious to the scene.
 retains the face that turns away from a tended animal,
and from the Philadelphia version he takes the pro-
tracted arm, with a reminiscence of its London fold
(the arm is bent ever so slightly, even doubly bent:
a brushstroke above the wrist, diagonally indenting
the forearm, suggests a non-human double articulation
of the limb). The lack at the center of Cezanne's
Philadelphia Large Bathers has been filled. But why
with a turtle?

And was it necessary? Three Bathers, 1907 (Minneapolis

Institute of Arts), a painting Matisse would come to
regard as a study for the three-times-larger St. Louis
picture, tells us that indeed it was (Figure 1.4).1
Figure 1.3 Paul Cézanne, The Large Bathers (Les grandes According to Jack Flam, Three Bathers was painted in
baigneuses), 1906. Oil on canvas, 208.3 x 251.5 cm. Philadelphia early summer 1907, prior to the Cézanne show -
Museum of Art. Purchased with the W. P. Wilstach Fund
yet the blonde squatter is already in place, as are the
two other figures (in any case the Cézannism of the
Let's go back to the feeding gesture of the blonde. compositional threesome is striking and Flam is right
We know exactly where it comes from: straight out to recall the master's Three Bathers that Matisse had
of Cezanne's Large Bathers, the London version as well owned since 1899 and would keep as a talisman until
as the Philadelphia one, both of which Matisse 1936).2 This is a boring picture, but it has much to
doubtless admired in the large Cézanne retrospective teach us, if only by contrast, about our painting. First,
held at the Salon d'Automne during the fall of 1907 though two of the bathers' faces are left blank, the
(Figure 1.3). On a scale of rotation, the orientation direction of their various gazes never raises a problem:
in space of Matisse's feeder is at the exact mean the blank-faced squatter, almost in profile, considers
between the two different positions given by Cézanne her right foot from which, perhaps, her hand brushes
to his seated figure on the left. In the London version, the sand,- the second blank-faced figure has comfort-
she is seen from behind (abundant hair, creaseless ably interspersed a large magenta towel between her
buttocks), petting a dog at her side that she does not skin and the reddish brown rock on which she sits,
watch, her long arm bent and slightly twisted in space and she's getting dry: we do not care to know more,-
so as to remain parallel with the picture plane. In the finally, the standing nude, with her right hand on her
Philadelphia version she is in full profile, her pin-head hip hidden from view by a pale green towel, is clearly
face is featureless, and her interminable, prolonged looking away - though her facial features are mere
arm stretches towards an inexplicable lack, an absence ciphers - at something behind the beholder. The three
which four other extended arms also reach for. What nudes do not communicate any more than the figures
are they all doing, those three women united in their in Bathers with a Turtle, but their postures and attitudes
attention to a patent void? They seem to be playing are in no way uncertain. Furthermore, the two towels
with a fire, warming their hands - nothing could be provide a material link between the women's bodies:
more absurd, but their converging gesture is no more while the left foot of the standing nude touches the
explained if one deems the canvas unfinished, and magenta towel on the ground, her own towel falls on
imagines there the missing dog. the foot of the squatter. Each figure enjoys a moment
of privacy after a swim (the blue expanse is revealed
Matisse positions his squatter at +45° on the figurai as still water by the presence of four small inviting
arc of gyration, equidistant between back view and sailing boats),- each minds her own bodily business,
full profile. But he also combines other elements of but without ignoring the other two, and we can very
Cezanne's two paintings: from the London version he well imagine the three of them later rejoining a

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game on the beach, or going home together. It is a
genre painting without much enigma, somewhat vac-
uous. (In the slightly bigger Woman on a Terrace at the
Hermitage, probably painted somewhat earlier and
looking almost like a pendant - with the same sailboats,
hills, bright color range, and shallow ambiance -
the figure seems to be asking the fairy tale's question:
"Sister Anne, do you see anything coming?")
Or could it be that Three Bathers is not vacant
enough? That there are too many props (towels,
hills on the other side of the water, boats, rock), too
many details, urging us to fill out the temporary
pause with a narrative?
All these props have been eliminated in the St. Louis
picture, replaced by the sole turtle. Impossible to
construct a story with that! Though reading the turtle
as a mythological symbol of silent female submission,
or as alluding to the Darwinian schema of evolution
(with the simian central figure providing the next link
in a chain of being), seems beside the point,3 both
iconological interpretations offer a common hint: let
us allow that the canvas does touch upon the condition
of mankind, which accounts for the feeling of awe it
has elicited right from the start, and that it tells us
that such a condition has much to do with silence
(let's drop the idea of female submission). But the
silence in question is tragic,- not that of quietude,
but that of solitude. And it is a modern silence, not
ii
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Figure 1.4 Henri Matisse, Three Bathers, 1907.
Oil on canvas, 9.3 x 11.3 cm.
The Minneapolis Institute of Arts,
Bequest of Putnam Dana McMillan
an immemorial one: the silence engulfing humanity
once it has been orphaned from God. The painting
is about an irremediable absence of communication,
about the impossibility of telling stories: that's why
each nude is in her own bubble, why they don't touch
or overlap, why their gazes don't converge on the
inoffensive reptile.
I noted earlier how thinly and fluently the turtle is
painted (drawn would be a better word),- its inclusion
might even have been a late decision, perhaps prompted
by the elongated neck of the sitter, or, why not?, the
adoption of a pet turtle by one of Matisse's students.4
Whatever the case, it is well chosen. Never would
Cezanne's dog have so effectively voided this painting's
world of the possibility of language. A turtle is almost
inert as an object, it is cold and hard, its face is a
mask. Yet there is no reason to believe that it suffers
from this expressionless withdrawal. In this respect,
it is not like us humans. In his somber, austere painting,
Matisse tells us that we can no more converse with a
tortoise than we can among ourselves.
The hero of this elegy about the lack of language is,
of course, the central character, who seems to be
stuffing her finger in her mouth,- or does she nervously
suck her hair? The pose has been associated with
Gauguin's Dans les vagues or Be Mysterious, where a figure
seen from the back seems to be devouring her right
hand, and also with that of the first African object

Figure 1.5 Vili Figure. People's Republic of the Congo.
Wood, 24 cm high. Private collection
Matisse had bought, in 1906 - an empty-eyed, small
statue from the Congo whose arms are symmetrically
folded, hands holding the lower lip (Figure 1.5).5
A very plausible association, but one need not go
so far. Matisse's figure is half the size of her adult
neighbor, whose curling toes I've already mentioned,
and thus she registers as a teenager - an age discrep-
ancy that her even more immature coy gesture
would serve to confirm. One can hardly read her
barely nubile body (the nascent breast, the oval
beginning of a pregnancy) as an indication of hope.
Her lack of assurance cancels any such interpreta-
tion - she might be erect, one leg almost perfectly
vertical, but she is plied by the frame, her arms and
neck retracted. Matisse made her diminutive. He
labored on her posture, changing it several times. At
one point she was more of a central column, frontal
and positioned straight above the turtle,- at another,
her left leg was further to the right, passing behind
the knee of the sitter,- and even once she had reached figures is pertinent: they do belong to the same species.
her current position, she still lost a good chunk of her
right arm (we can see very clearly that it was initially
fatter and longer, the elbow more pointed). Matisse
rarely bothers cleaning up pentimenti. Here this
apparent laissez-faire is more willful than usual (is that parallel brushstrokes always following the directions
why we tend to remember the painting as impastoed,
12
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even though the paint layer, in most places, is very
thin?) The visible corrections help to dwarf the
standing figure and isolate her from her monumental
siblings. Whatever her proximity, she is kept at a
distance,- her cantilevered posture and her facial
expression remain unfathomable. Whatever her oral
activity, it precludes speech.
Early spectators sensed this fundamental loneliness.
Calling the canvas 'The Sea," Shchukin spoke about
a "feeling of sadness and melancholy" engendered by
it (even though he also mentioned the "freshness, the
greatness of the ocean"),-6 he asked Matisse to paint
something in the same vein for him, and the result
was the far less gloomy Game of Bowls (Figure 1 .6). The
best early commentary, dating from 1911, is provided
by Wilhelm Niemeyer. It's a fairly competent formal
analysis, with a rather dated emphasis on geometrical
and "essential" relations: "The formal rhythms of reality
are rendered in their ultimate mathematical function:
standing, sitting, crouching. The three naked bodies
provide the basic corporal postures." Its conclusion:
"From the mute existence of these characters, flooded
with light and tall in front of the dark and heavy
distances, neither touching nor crossing each other,
isolated and yet linked by the breath of a common
elementary line, emanates the lonely melancholy of
the rhythm of silent sails at large on the sea."7
Of course there is not much air, very little "breath"
in this canvas. And Niemeyer is more accurate when
he notes the strange contrast between the overly lit
figures and their dark surroundings (he could have
added the contradictory direction of the shadows: the
nudes are strongly lighted, yet not by any plausible
sun,- the sky is leaden). But the breath metaphor is
clearly indexed to Cézanne in Niemeyer's mind (early
in the text he writes, "Cezanne's great lesson is per-
fectly understood and maintained").8 The idea of a
common stylistic denominator bonding the three
Niemeyer speaks about an "elementary line" - I sup-
pose he refers to the bold contours highlighted in
magenta here and there - but as far as shared elements
are concerned, he could also have alluded to the long
of the limbs (quite un-Cézannian at that). Some
 Figure 1.6 Henri Matisse,
Game of Bowls (Joueurs de boules), 1908.
Oil on canvas, 113.5 x 145 cm.
The Hermitage Museum,
St. Petersburg

anatomical features are shared as well: formless slippers similarities, apart from sheer size: Picasso's characters
in place of feet, flattened shoulders, the odd attach- too are isolated, each in her own one-to-one rela-
ment of the head to the body. The most interesting tionship with the petrified viewer,- they too emulate
link with Cézanne, however, especially as he was Cézannian poses,- they too have masklike faces (no
understood by Matisse at the time, is the sense of an need to underline that Picasso's primitivism is far more
equilibrium in tension, the proclivity of the two right strident than Matisse's). It is my contention that
figures checked on the other side by the countering Bathers with a Turtle takes part in a game of tit for tat
arc of the squatter ready to spring if need be. between Matisse and Picasso. The legend has it that
Matisse did not like the Demoiselles. At least the picture
And this is perhaps Matisse's strongest turn: the puzzled him, challenged him: he had to respond.
dialectic opposition between the formal coalescence
of the group, cemented with all the energy of the The scenario can be reconstructed with some accuracy,
dynamic structure and the "common elementary line," its general line is pretty well known by now. Pierre
and the incurable isolation of each of its members. Daix's argument that Picasso could only have begun
The totalizing unity comes from late Cézanne all noticing Matisse's art in the fall of 1905 is convinc-
right, but Matisse inflected it with the eerie paratactic ing.10 But Picasso also notices at that moment, as
organization of the master's early bather canvases, the does Matisse, the art of Ingres whose vast exhibition
1876-77 Bathers at Rest from the Barnes Foundation, at the Salon d'Automne that year, including The Turkish
for example, which he had seen at the Salon d'Automne Bath and The Golden Age, is a surprise to all, and Picasso's
of 1905 (the Salon of the "Fauve" scandal).9 Rose period paintings take a Neoclassical turn. At
the 1906 Salon des Indépendants in the spring, or
Yet this painting about separateness, dearth of language, very shortly afterwards at Leo and Gertrude Stein's
and asociality itself takes part in a dialogue: perhaps apartment, Picasso is stupefied, probably more than
what the cantilevered hunchback is looking at, beyond anyone else, by Matisse's Le Bonheur de vivre (Figure 1.8)
the sitter and the turtle which her face overhangs, is which exaggerates the devertebration to which Ingress
Picasso's Demoiselles d'Avignon (Figure 1.7). How differ- figures are submitted and attacks, from all possible
ent from Matisse's canvas! Picasso's prostitutes are angles, the tradition on which Ingress art stands. The
stylistically disjunct (emphatically so),- they all stare Renaissance anatomical canon is deliberately scorned,
in the same direction,- and the single object of their the ideal of stylistic unity flouted, the beholder's gaze
gaze is the one which is most ignored by Matisse's made unable to focus. Grating colors, swirling contours,
bathers: the beholder. And yet there are obvious conflicting pastiches of innumerable sources, melting

!3

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 nudes: with this painting Matisse is a mighty saboteur Picasso: he introduces him to African art. He then
who consumes the whole of Western tradition and departs for Collioure, and Picasso rolls up his sleeves:
(with the embezzlement of Ingress arabesque) liquifies at last he feels up to challenging Le Bonheur de vivre.
it. How pallid by comparison is Picasso's own Ingrisme
at that time!11 That will be with the Demoiselles d'Avignon, a canvas
even larger than Matisse's. He'll take on Matisse's
The two artists meet through the Steins. Picasso is somewhat ridiculous frolicking nymphs (borrowed
still at work on the portrait of Gertrude as Monsieur from Ingress Golden Age) and, demonizing The Turkish
Bertin, but now he feels Matisse breathing down his Bath, he'll paint a brothel scene. But what Matisse
neck: not only does he see Le Bonheur de vivre each timebrings back to Paris in March 1907, just in time for
he goes to the Steins' for dinner, but he knows that the Salon des Indépendants, is itself a knockout. Blue
his portrait will have to share a wall with Woman withNude (Figure 1.9) creates quite a stir and confirms its
a Hat, which the Steins had bought the year before. Hisauthor as the king of the avant-garde (it is bought
discovery of the archaic "deformations" of Iberian art, by Leo Stein immediately after the Salon). Against
while Matisse is out of town, visiting Algeria, comes in such a crude bombshell, the mere choice of a hot
handy. He spends the summer at Gosol, where he topic is not a strong enough strategy. Picasso abandons
revisits Ingres once more, this time through primitivistthe brothel scenario, though he keeps the whores. He
lenses. Back in Paris, he erases Gertrude's head, and wants to outdo Matisse's savage attack on the human
in one session replaces it with the famous, arresting anatomy. (A point in passing: this savagery is not yet
mask. A page is turned in the history of portraiture: thought of as imported from another culture, for it is
now it is Matisse who looks tame, all the more since much later that Matisse's canvas will be called Blue

he refrains from sending to the Salon d'Automne the Nude [Souvenir de Biskra]; for the time being, it is known
two versions of The Young Sailor, the most daring as Tableau No. Ill, and not a single critic considers
fruits of his summer crop. What he exhibits (notably the nude as being of African or North African descent.
Marguerite Reading and Still Life with a Red Rug) is over- It is less to emulate Matisse that Picasso appeals to
shadowed by Gauguin's retrospective at the Salon.12 non-Western sources than it is to pin him down.)13
Nevertheless, Matisse has a surprise in stock for Even the Iberian masks are not frightening enough:

Figure 1.7 Pablo Picasso, Les Demoiselles d'Avignon, 1907. Figure 1.8 Henri Matisse, Le Bonheur de vivre, 1905-06. Oil on canvas,
Oil on canvas, 243.9 x 233.7 cm. The Museum of Modern 174 x 238.1 cm. The Barnes Foundation, Merion, Pennsylvania. Photograph
Art, New York. Acquired through the Lillie P. Bliss Bequest © reproduced with permission of The Barnes Foundation, All rights reserved

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 Figure 1.9 Henri Matisse, Blue Nude, 1907.
Oil on canvas, 92.1 x 142.5 cm.
The Baltimore Museum of Art,
Crone Collection

Picasso brings in African art, incidentally showing what the women are doing! Oddly, Le Luxe I has no
Matisse what poor use he had made of it if his goal problem being admitted). This new scandal, amid
was to debase the Western tradition (Matisse's only Cezanne's retrospective at the Salon, definitively
explicit allusion to African art, so far, is a representa-confirms Matisse as the head of the "new school."
tion of the little Congo sculpture mentioned above
in a 1906 still-life. And if Picasso has decoded the But not so definitively: it is probably at this juncture
exaggerated buttocks of Blue Nude and read them as (fall 1907) that Matisse sees the Demoiselles d'Avignon
African, then his Demoiselles may be seen to shame in Picasso's studio. According to one account, he is
Matisse for lacking the courage to dot his i's). furious, according to another, he is hilarious: let's just
say that he's not at ease. Daix argues, cogently, that
Let's not anticipate. Picasso will be brooding for severalMatisse also sees Picasso's Nude with Drapery, an obvious
months - no painting was ever more sketched out radicalization of his own Blue Nude, and the first state,
and worked upon than the "Philosophical Brothel," more dynamic and hatched, of Picasso's Three Women
as André Salmon called it. Unaware of this, Matisse (Figure 1.10).14 Picasso's pet turtle might also have
has left for the South. For whatever reason, he cer- been in the studio.15
tainly has Picasso on his mind, but, perhaps feeling
confident, he does not stretch himself. La Coijjure There is no doubt that Matisse is startled. In his

responds to Picasso's 1906 picture on the same theme, interview with Apollinaire, whose manuscript he edits
but is strangely classicizing by comparison. The other heavily and which is published at the end of the year,
paintings of the late spring are Three Bathers (the one can read, between the lines, a bad case of "anxiety
Minneapolis painting), not a very high note, and the of influence" ("I believe that the personality of the
still tentative but much more promising Music (Sketch),artist develops and asserts itself through the struggles
now at MOMA. To recharge his batteries, Matisse it has to go through when pitted against other per-
travels to Italy, accepting an invitation from the Steinssonalities. If the fight is fatal and the personality suc-
to stay at their villa in Fiesole (Leo is a pest, a syco- cumbs, it is a matter of destiny"). Apollinaire's text
phant and a braggart who talks endlessly: impossible alludes to Matisse's capacity for borrowing from "all
to look at works of art with him). Back in Collioure, formal languages," including that of "the statuettes of
having managed to peep at Giotto and Piero, MatisseAfrican negroes proportioned to the passions that have
paints Le Luxe I, his only ambitious work of the season.inspired them." "But," it adds, "though curious to know
He brings it to the Salon d'Automne along with, amongthe artistic capacities of all the human races, Henri
other things, Music (Sketch) and La Coiffure. The latter Matisse remains above all devoted to the European
painting is refused, which must have been something sense of beauty."16 It sounds like the brief of a bad
of a surprise (at least there one understands at a glance lawyer camouflaging a retreat.

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Figure 1.10 Pablo Picasso, Three Women, 1907-08. Oil on
canvas, 78 1/4 x 70 1/8 Daix 131. The Hermitage Museum,
Leningrad
Matisse wants to answer, and to answer one has to
understand: this is why, I think, we should place the
famous exchange of a canvas with Picasso at this point.
The small Pitcher, Bowl, and Lemon Picasso trades for
his "childlike" Portrait oj Marguerite is not at all in the
league of the Demoiselles, of course, but in some ways
it is more "advanced," in that it already explores one
of the principles that will come to fruition in Picasso's
Three Women a few months later and give birth to
Cubism: the fact that the same sign, depending on the
context, can refer to utterly different things (here
the contour of a lemon and the rim of a bowl).
Matisse stays in Paris that fall and winter, and he is
extremely busy becoming famous. In October he sells
Still Life with Asphodels (as "childlike" as Marguerite's
portrait, but with a touch of spookiness) to Karl Ernst
Osthaus (see Figure 3.1). The militant collector
immediately places it in his Folkwang Museum in
Hagen (it's the first Matisse to enter a museum), where
it is included in an exhibition of still-lifes that includes
six other canvases by him. Osthaus also commissions
a ceramic triptych and, according to Laurie Stein,
hosts a small one-man show of Matisse's work in
Hagen, from which he purchases La Berg e (River
i6
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Landscape; see Figure 3.3).17 And he is not the only
newcomer to be hooked: in December, Shchukin
admires Matisse's work at Gertrude Stein's - he will
start buying a couple months later. In January,
Matisse opens his academy (among all the foreign
students are Margarete Moll, who has just bought the
Minneapolis painting, and Hans Purrmann, through
whom he had met Osthaus).
Despite his busy schedule, Matisse does not forget
his contest with Picasso. Thanks to Laurie Stein's
research, we know that Bathers with a Turtle must have
been finished by March 1908, since Purrmann is
urging Osthaus to buy it. Matisse would agree to
special financial conditions, but, writes Purrmann, one
should hurry: the Steins are interested. If they did not
rush yet, it's because they lacked space (a dubious
argument, since they'll buy Picasso's Three Women, not
a miniature, in the fall of that year,- they had already
admired Picasso's work in progress, and my guess is
that they were waiting to see what would come out
of it, betting on one artist against the other).
But why did Matisse refrain from showing Bathers with
a Turtle at the 1908 Salon des Indépendants, which
opened on March 20? There is the possibility that
it was not finished in time (that would fortify the
notion of the turtle itself as a last minute addition,
becoming a private pun on one's slowness). But the
two Salons are a big affair for Matisse in those years
(Picasso did not take part in them): one made sure
not to miss the deadline. Given the fact that Matisse
often put all his eggs in the same basket (in 1906 he
had sent only Le Bonheur de vivre to the Salon), and
given that it's the first time since 1903 that he fails to
participate, I incline to the view that he had planned
to show this painting, and this painting only, but that
he backed out just before the catalogue went to print.
Furthermore, we know that it was not instantly whisked
away to Hagen because Gelett Burgess, along with
Inez Haynes Irwin, saw it in Matisse's studio on
April 20. 18 Purrmann's correspondence with Osthaus
shows a Matisse eager to sell to the Hagen collector:
his great work would go to a museum, and a museum
that already hosted Cézanne (Osthaus was perhaps
the last to visit the Aix master, and he later published
a very sensitive account of their conversation in front
of the Philadelphia Large Bathers-, it is not hard to
imagine that Matisse heard a version of this account).19
With such an important sale on the burner, did he
want to protect his canvas from the predictable jeers
of the critics who might discourage even so adven-
turous a buyer? Perhaps. In retrospect, we know what
agony Matisse suffered when Shchukin, taken aback
by the general condemnation of Music and Dance at
the 1910 Salon d'Automne, temporarily cancelled
his commission.
Or perhaps Matisse declared forfeit. Not getting cold
feet, but feeling that the game is unfair and therefore
not interesting. "The first time one might say that
[Picasso] had ever shown at a public show was when constantly solicited, each point vying for attention
Derain and Braque, completely influenced by his
recent work, showed theirs," writes Gertrude Stein,
referring to Derain's Toilette and Braques now lost
Woman, exhibited at the 1908 Salon des Indépendants,
paintings that "first publicly showed that Derain and
Braque had become Picassoites and were definitively unsurpassed account of this shift, from a visual alle-
not Matisseites."20 The art world was much smaller
then than now, and the go-betweens far fewer. It
would have been almost impossible for Matisse not
to have heard, before the Salon, of the new direction
taken by his ex-Fauve acolytes-, if Picasso is sending
only his lieutenants, he may have thought, why
should I bother joining the battle? Why cast pearls
before swine?21
Allowing that this scenario is right, what
would Matisse want to convey to Picasso with his
Bathers with a Turtle? To answer this question properly,
one has to go back to the beginning of the dialogue,
to Le Bonheur de vivre. As I've suggested earlier, this is a
painting where Matisse devours and melts the whole paint the next step: the resulting pétrification. (Are not
of Western pictorial tradition (art historians have been
prompted to play at identifying sources, from Titian
to Poussin, from Agostino Carraci to Giorgione,
from Watteau to Goya, from Gauguin to Cross, etc.).
It is, to put it briefly, a strongly Oedipal work.
Moreover, it ostensibly connects the Oedipal conflict
at the historical level with what we could term its
thematic equivalent in the psychological realm of
human development: it concerns the difference of
sexes and thus, in psychoanalytic terms, the castration
complex (figures change gender during the elaboration
17
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of the work, or end up with an unidentified one,-
bodies are chopped - a foot is sliced by a blade of
grass, etc.).22 But none of this would work if Matisse
had not found the stylistic means to transform the
beholder of his painting into Oedipus: in front of
this hallucinatory image, where scale is no more con-
sistent than in a dream and where all levels of reality
commingle, the viewer's gaze is unmoored, it can't
focus anywhere. It is blinded.
Picasso's Demoiselles does all of the above, engaging
with the same Oedipal material, except that its
blinding strategy is not based on a dizzying multi-
plication of focal points away from which one is
in a cacophony of strident colors and turbulent lines.
His method is more archaic, more direct, more
apotropaic: he turns the whole picture into the head
of Medusa, into the monster who transforms anyone
who dares glance at her into stone.23 Leo Steinberg's
gory to "the adventure of a collision with art," may
not take Matisse into consideration (one can't do
everything at once, and it is thanks to Steinberg's
essay on the Demoiselles that we are now prepared to
see through Matisse's imagery of "idyllic primeval
state" and "celebration of unsoiled innocence").24
But it is not, I think, only his earlier plans for a brothel
scene that Picasso blasts in the final version of the
Demoiselles: in his competitive frenzy, he also has to
find a way to daze the viewer more effectively than
Matisse, the master bedazzler.
Dazzled himself at first, Matisse regains his compo-
sure: he will follow up on Picasso's nightmare. He'll
his three bathers almost of stone? Many commentators
have noted their sculptural weight.) He'll paint the
blind beholders, their bottomless solitude, their world
devoid of attributes, their forlorn introspection. Some-
thing, he tells Picasso, must follow the terror and
the loss, and the name of that thing is "melancholia."
The dialogue does not stop here: Picasso's own Three
Women, begun earlier but finished several months after
Bathers with a Turtle, will in turn broach the absorptive
thematic of Matisse's painting.25 And then, in Music,
 painted two years later, Matisse will be the one to
change course, adopting the Medusa strategy of the
Demoiselles, the silence of his own Bathers becoming
suddenly even more ominous.

Still three years later after Music, with many

canvases of decorative ebullience in between, Matisse
will paint The Blue Window (Figure 1.11), an oneiric
picture that will lead André Breton to write his first
Surrealist text. The original title of this painting, now
at MOMA, was La Glace sans tain (the mirror without
silvering). Once again the latent theme is that of
not-seeing, always a sinister topic for painting. It is
one of the most unsettling canvases by Matisse, carry-
ing the same sense of Chiricoesque irreality as Bathers
with a Turtle, albeit through different means. Osthaus
saw the connection: he bought it as well. This was an
act of curatorial brilliance, overlooked since its era-
sure by the Nazis. When we look at the St. Louis
picture, let us not forget to imagine the smaller blue
dream hanging on the same wall. It may help us to
treat the little tortoise with respect: with her at least
all is not yet completely stilled. A turtle is almost a
rock, but not quite.

Figure 1.11 Henri Matisse, The Blue Window, 1913.

Oil on canvas, 130.8 x 90.5 cm. Museum of Modern Art, Abby
Aldrich Rockefeller Fund

Notes

s'honore
1 . I thank Wanda de Guébriant for par son silence': Sources et
signaling 4. signifi-
As John Richardson noted, a model used
to me that Matisse inscribed "Composition: by Matisse's students in his academy was
cations de Baigneuses à la tortue de Matisse,"
Revue
étude pour la peinture 'Les Femmes à la de l'art, no. 92 (1991): 76-86.photographed
The nude standing next to a turtle.
author's
tortue " on the back of a photograph of thereasons for invoking Greek This photograph, published by Billy Klüver
mythol-
Minneapolis painting. and Julie Martin (Kiki's Paris: Artists and
ogy, Plutarch, and Aristotle, are unwarranted.
The Darwinian reading is more common.
Lovers, 1900-1930 [New York: Abrams, 1988],
TheHis
2. See Jack Flam, Matisse.- The Man and best p. 43) is is
proponent of this interpretation
Art, dated by them "1911 or 1912,"
1860-1918 (Ithaca: Cornell University but
Jack Flam, tentatively in his Matisse: we
The are not told on what ground. See
Man
Press, 1986), pp. 202-3. Richardson, A Lije oj Picasso, vol. 2 (New
and His Art and more precisely in "Henri
York: Random House, 1996), p. 449 n. 49.
Matisse: Bathers with a Turtle," Art News
3. The "female submission" reading(December
is pro- 1990): 101-2.
posed by Claudia Rousseau in '"Une femme

i8

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5. For Gauguin, see Rousseau, pp. 81-83,- I
do not recall where I have read the pairing
with the Congo statuette. For the purchase
of this African object and Matisse's early
interest in African art, see Jack Flam, "Matisse
and the Fauves" in "Primitiuism" in 20th Century
Art, ed. William Rubin (New York: Museum
of Modern Art, 1984), pp. 211-39.
6. Letter of Shchukin to Matisse dated June
2, 1908. Published in A. Kostenevich and
N. Semionova, Matisse et la Russie (Paris:
Flammarion, 1993), p. 161.
7. Wilhelm Niemeyer, "Henri Matisse - Der
Architektonische Rythmus" in Denskschrift des
Sonderbundes auf die Ausstellung MCMX.
Malerisches Impressionen und koloristischer
Rhythmus (Düsseldorf, May 191 1), pp. 87-
88. This essay was brought to light by
Dominique Fourcade and Eric de Chassey,
who translated a large section from it in
their critical anthology for Henri Matisse,
i 904- 19 17 (Paris: Centre Georges
Pompidou, 1993), pp. 445-46. (This publi-
cation erroniously attributes the article to
Oskar Niemeyer.) Niemeyer sees the ominous
climate of the painting as embedded in
metaphysics, and thus characterizes its
peculiarity in Matisse's oeuvre of the period:
"The issues it concerns are German ones,
but treated through French art, in the sense
of a definitely pictorial sensibility and a ver-
itable optical culture."
8. Ibid., p. 86.
9. The term "paratactic" to characterize this
painting is borrowed from Tim Clark, who
also noted the picture's oneiric quality. See
Clark, "Freud's Cézanne," Representations 51
(Fall 1995): 96.
10. See Pierre Daix, Picasso /Matisse
(Neuchâtel: Ides et Calendes, 1996), pp. 5-
9. I am basing the following scenario on the
cumulative research done by many scholars
during the last quarter of a century. Among
the most important have been: Leo Steinberg's
ground-breaking essay on the Demoiselles,
"The Philosophical Brothel" (1972), reprint-
ed in October 44 (spring 1988),- Jack Flam's
Matisse: The Man and His Art; and the two-vol-
ume exhibition catalogue Les Demoiselles
d'Avignon (Paris: Musée Picasso, 1988), con-
taining a detailed chronology by Hélène
Seckel and Judith Cousins, an anthology
of early critical responses and eyewitness
accounts compiled by Hélène Seckel, and
a book-length essay by William Rubin reca-
pitulating all his past work on the picture,
"The Genesis of the Demoiselles d'Avignon."
These last three texts have been translated
into English in a special issue of Studies in
Modern Art, no. 3 (1994).
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1 1. That Ingres interested both Picasso and
Matisse in 1905-6 is common knowledge by
now, but Daix eloquently conveys their
rivalry over this legacy. See Daix, pp. 19-30.
12. For brevity's sake, I have left the issue of
Gauguin's legacy out of my narrative, but it
plays an important part in the competition
between Picasso and Matisse in 1906. In the
fall of that year, Picasso realized several
woodcuts which emphasize the rough grain
of the wood, very much like Gauguin's
woodcuts and unlike Matisse's three known
woodcuts, some of which were exhibited in
spring 1906 (at Galerie Druet, at the same
time as the Salon des Indépendants). My
thanks to David Drogin for reminding me
of this aspect of the rivalry.
13. See the excellent dissertation by Alistair
Wright, "Identity Trouble: The Deconstructive
Drive in Henri Matisse's Painting, 1905-1914"
(New York: Columbia University, 1996),
pp. 360 ff. According to Wright, it is only in
1931, at Matisse's retrospective at the Galerie
Georges Petit in Paris, that the painting was
baptized Nu bleu (souvenir de Biskra).
14. Daix, pp. 99 and ff. For a more developed
account of the chronology, and especially of
that of the work on Three Women, see Daix,
"The Chronology of Proto-Cubism: New
Data on the Opening of the Picasso/Braque
Dialogue" in William Rubin and Lynn
Zelevansky, Picasso and Bracjue: A Symposium
(New York: Museum of Modern Art, 1992),
pp. 306-21.
15. John Richardson notes that, according
to Fernande Olivier, Picasso had a tortoise
from 1909 on (Richardson, p. 449 n. 49).
For the beauty of the story, let's imagine he
already had it a year and a half before.
16. Guillaume Apollinaire, "Henri Matisse"
(December 1907),- translated in Jack Flam,
Matisse on Art, revised ed. (Berkeley:
University of California Press, 1995) p. 29.
17. See Stein, in this volume, p. 52.
18. See Isabelle Monod-Fontaine and
Claude Laugier, "Eléments de chronologie
(1904-1918)," in Henri Matisse, 1904-1917,
pp. 83-84.
19. Osthaus's account, first published in
1921, is translated into French in Michael
Doran, ed., Conversations avec Cézanne
(Paris: Macula, 1978), pp. 96-100.
20. Gertrude Stein, The Autobiography of Alice
B. Toklas, as quoted by Daix, "The
Chronology of Proto-Cubism," p. 314.
19
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2 1 . Matisse obviously thought that the case
would be different at the 1908 Salon
d'Automne, where he was scheduled to have
a mini-retrospective (he showed thirty
works, including paintings, drawings, and
sculptures). And indeed, next to Harmony in
Red, of the same size, the stark austerity of
Bathers with a Turtle would have been impres-
sive. In May 1908, perhaps indicating that
the painting was still in Paris, Purrmann
wrote to Osthaus: "This year Matisse is a
jury member of the Salon dAutomne and
will have a whole room to himself.... As far
as I remember, you mentioned that you do
not yet have space for this picture. Should
this be the case, would it be possible for
you to lend the picture to Matisse for the
exhibition? It would be nice and Matisse
would be delighted." My thanks to Laurie
Stein for making the text of this letter avail-
able to me.
22. For a serious Freudian reading of Le Bonheur
de vivre, see Margaret Werth, "Engendering
Imaginary Modernism: Henri Matisse's
Bonheur de vivre," Genders 9 (Fall 1990): 50-74. I
elaborated upon her study in "On Matisse:
The Blinding," October 68 (spring 1994):
62-121. The ideas contained in this para-
graph and the next one (on Picasso) are
more developed in this earlier essay.
23. On Picasso's Demoiselles dì Avignon as
Medusa, see my "On Matisse: The Blinding,"
pp. 103-4 and "Painting As Trauma," Art
in America (June 1988,- to be republished
in an anthology on the painting edited by
Christopher Green for Cambridge University
Press). See also William Rubin, "The Genesis
of the Demoiselles dì Avignon'1 p. 115.
24. See Leo Steinberg, "The Philosophical
Brothel," 1988. The first quotation is p. 46,
the second, p. 55.
25. On this canvas, see the extraordinary
essay by Leo Steinberg, "Resisting Cézanne:
Picasso's 'Three Women,"' Art in America
(November-December 1978): 115-33. The
contrast with the Demoiselles is analyzed by
Steinberg, p. 121.
NB: note addition on Oskar/Wilhelm
Niemeyer, n. 77