Bathers by a River
Henri Matisse
HENRI MATISSE, 1917. OIL ON CANVAS.
In a single painting we are shown a decades worth of styles, of fears, anxieties, hopes, dreams, and fashions, and we gain insight into the process of one of the greatest artists of the 20th century. In 1909, Henri Matisse was commissioned by a wealthy Russian collector to paint two large scale works for his Moscow home. Matisse proposed three works, and the collector chose the two that went on to be known as ‘Dance II’ and ‘Music’, two of the artists most celebrated and famous works. He rejected this, ‘Bathers at the River’, and for a few years it sat unfinished, a seedling of an idea, in Matisse’s studio. Nearly 4 years later, he revisited the work, and began to update it for his new style. The loose, fluid, dancerly forms and composition that characterised ‘Dance II’ felt ill-fitting for a world at war, and he had moved on stylistically, with a deep interest in Cubism. So the work that had represent one decade, felt out of place in a new one, and Matisse made the figures more column like, more rigorous and divided, and wholly more abstract. Over the next half-decade he continued to work, refining and changing the painting, restricting the palette and distorting the figures until, almost exactly a decade after it’s initiation, he deems it finished. The final work speaks to ten years of artistic and political turmoil, and the consistence of beauty amongst it.