The Void Between the Figures
Henri Matisse didn't finish Bathers by a River in a weekend. He wrestled with it for eight years. It started in 1909 as a soft scene of pastoral bliss and ended in 1917 as a cold and architectural monument to the modern world. By the time he was done the air in Europe had turned to flying lead and the Great War was eating everything in sight.
Matisse looked at the Cubists and saw a challenge. He didn't want to lose his soul to their gray boxes but he knew the old way of painting was dead. He carved this canvas into vertical strips. He turned a river into a black band of nothingness that cuts through the center like a scar. The figures lost their faces and their soft curves. They became statues of green and gray standing on the edge of a void.
This is what happens when a colorist stops trying to please the eye and starts trying to survive the era. The canvas is huge and oppressive. At over eight feet tall and nearly thirteen feet wide it feels less like a painting and more like a wall. The figures don’t look at each other and they don’t look at us, either. In a space that has been stripped of its comfort, they just exist . Matisse proved that you could be radical without losing your grip on the paint. He took the chaos of the decade and pinned it to a grid. It was 1918 when the public finally saw the painting and the world they knew was already gone.
References
Matisse, Henri. Bathers by a River. 1917. Oil on canvas. Art Institute of Chicago, Chicago.
Elderfield, John. Matisse in the Collection of the Museum of Modern Art. New York: Museum of Modern Art, 1978.
Flam, Jack. Matisse. The Man and His Art, 1869-1918. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1986.