As the gray days and chilly weather of February drag on, you may find yourself longing for sunshine and sea air. Although the curators at the Saint Louis Art Museum can’t quite conjure a salty breeze, they are offering the next best thing with Matisse and the Sea, on view beginning February 17.
The new exhibition is the first to focus specifically on Henri Matisse’s fascination with the sea and global influences throughout his long career. The modernist artist captured the waves in paintings, cutouts, drawings, ceramics, and more—all of which will be featured among the exhibition’s many objects.
Matisse and the Sea was curated by Simon Kelly, SLAM’s curator of modern and contemporary art. Although he’s been actively planning the exhibition for the past five years, Kelly says he’s been thinking about the relationship between Matisse and the sea since he first came to SLAM 14 years ago.
“I remember I was asked [in 2010] what was my favorite painting in the modern collection, and I actually said Matisse’s ‘Bathers with a Turtle,’ so even at that point I was thinking about some kind of show,” he says.
“Bathers with a Turtle,” the massive painting depicting three nude women by the seaside observing a small turtle, is an anchor point for the exhibition and will be a familiar sight for regular visitors to the museum. But it will be surrounded by pieces loaned from private collectors, the Musée Matisse in Nice, the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Baltimore Museum of Art, and many other key collections of the artist’s work.
“Even though Matisse’s engagement with the sea in different moments of his career has been explored in the past,” Kelly says, “this is the first show that looks at the theme right across his career. I was interested to see the way that the sea acted as a catalyst for experimentation and evolution.”
The exhibition features not only Matisse’s own pieces but also objects showing how travel influenced his work. Such objects include textiles, shields, masks, and other artifacts from African and Oceanic cultures. They offer viewers the opportunity to draw straight lines from Matisse’s travels to the influences on the figures and patterns he chose to render in his style.
“For an audience, I think it’s going to be a really important and beautiful range of objects to see,” Kelly says. “It is a vicarious journey around France and around the world.”
The exhibition is arranged to facilitate that journey, guiding viewers from place to place alongside the modern master, with stops in such locales as Corsica, Nice, St. Tropez, and Tahiti.
“Hopefully [visitors] will have their own kind of experience of travel as they’re going through this show,” Kelly says. “That might be a nice thing to be doing in the depths of February—imagining you are in the French Riviera or French Polynesia.”
Matisse and the Sea runs through May 12. The exhibition is also the inspiration for February’s SLAM Underground event. Titled “FLOW,” the event on February 23 will include art-making, live performances, and beach-themed cocktails.