Pioneering or strange? Bathers with a Turtle stars in Matisse exhibition

Since its completion in February 1908, Bathers with a Turtle by Henri Matisse—one of the stars of the Saint Louis Art Museum’s permanent collection—has been turning heads.

American critic Gelett Burgess, who in 1908 after seeing the work in Matisse’s studio wrote, somewhat jokingly, that the artist was “the first to enter the undiscovered land of the ugly.” More avant-garde opinions hailed Matisse as a pioneer of modernism, and toward the end of his life, the painting was regarded as a pivotal point in his career. More than 100 years after its creation, it is still being discussed with bewilderment. In 2020, a critic for the Washington Post said, “of all the great masterpieces of early 20th-century art, Henri Matisse’s ‘Bathers with a Turtle’ remains, I think, the strangest.”

Bathers with a Turtle embodies Matisse’s global attitude toward his art, according to an essay by Simon Kelly, SLAM’s curator of modern and contemporary art, in the catalogue accompanying the Matisse and the Sea exhibition. The painting, which Kelly referred to as the Mona Lisa of the modern collection, brings together a range of formal sources from around the world, most evidently European fused with the appropriation of sub-Saharan African.

The enigmatic painting is among the most mysterious in Matisse’s body of work. It depicts three nude female bathers on a beach by the sea. The woman at the left is crouching over offering a leaf to a “turtle.” (A side note: Despite its title, the small animal pictured, with its round shell and short legs, appears to be a land-dwelling Mediterranean tortoise, as opposed to a turtle, which generally lives in or around water and has flippers or webbed feet.) The central figure holds her hands to her mouth while the woman on the right sits with her hands in her lap. Their gazes appear distracted in a scene that’s anything but playful. The bathers are placed in an abstracted background reduced to three bands of color: green for the grassy shore, ultramarine for the sea, and a teal blue for the sky.

By 1908, the year he finished the painting, Matisse owned as many as 20 African statues and masks, the style of which likely impacted his practice. In general, his powerfully angular and refined use of line in Bathers with a Turtle suggests the impact of the planar forms he admired in African statues. Also, his accentuated, dark outlines resemble carvings in wood. Most notably, Matisse seems to have sourced the pose of his central figure, with her hands at her mouth, from African sculptures he owned. The gesture in African sculpture may signify the chewing of bitterroot or the root of a hallucinogenic plant. However, Matisse was undoubtedly unaware of the original functions of these objects.

In the 1900s, Matisse, who considered himself a figure painter, produced an ongoing body of highly experimental work concentrating on the bather theme. Despite his formal radicalism, he showed little interest in painting modern life (contemporary bathing costumes, for example) and instead placed his subjects within timeless, arcadian environments. Bathers with a Turtle, however, presents a vision that is more dystopic than arcadian.

Matisse painted Bathers with a Turtle at a time when his reputation was on the rise, and after its completion, his gallerist, Félix Fénéon, asked the artist what price he should sell it for. Matisse set the value at 3,000 francs, the highest price thus far for any of his works. Matisse was active in finding the right home for the work and committed to selling to wealthy, German collector Karl Ernst Osthaus who established the Museum Folkwang in Hagen in 1902. It has often been considered the first museum of modern art.

The sale to Osthaus closed at a discounted 2,500 francs, and the painting arrived in Hagen by fall 1908 where it remained with Osthaus until his death in 1921. The painting then moved to Essen, the new location of Museum Folkwang.

In 1937, the Nazis removed Bathers with a Turtle from the museum, citing it as an example of degenerate art. It was then put in a sale of works from German public institutions at Galerie Fischer in Lucerne, Switzerland, on June 30, 1939. The young American collector Joseph Pulitzer Jr., then only 26, attended the sale, encouraged by Matisse’s son, Pierre, who was a noted art dealer. Pulitzer purchased the painting for 9,100 Swiss francs ($2,400). In addition to the Matisse work, Pulitzer bought two other pieces at the auction: Otto Mueller’s Drei Frauen (Nudes in a Landscape) and Wilhelm Lehmbruck’s terra-cotta sculpture Sitzendes Mädchen (Seated Girl).

“We were faced with a terrible conflict—a moral dilemma,” Pulitzer was quoted in a 1981 edition ARTnews (the quote was republished in a 1998 Saint Louis Art Museum Bulletin focused on the painting). “If the work was bought, we knew the money was going to a regime we loathed. If the work was not bought, it would be destroyed. To safeguard the art for posterity, it bought—defiantly! My purchases included a Matisse and a piece by Wilhelm Lehmbruck. But the real motive in buying was to preserve the art.”

Bathers with a Turtle was shipped to Pulitzer’s St. Louis home by mid-December 1939 where it appeared in a festive photograph the following holiday season, decked in evergreens and boasting a new frame, which it retains today. Pulitzer and his first wife, Louise Vauclain Pulitzer, would gift Bathers with a Turtle to the Saint Louis Art Museum in 1964.

The painting serves as a focal point in the Museum’s Matisse and the Sea exhibition, which is the first to examine the significance of the sea across Matisse’s career. The exhibition is on view from February 17 through May 12, 2024.