Matisse, Tahiti, and Talk About Water
July 12th, 2007As we prepare for our next exhibition we are constantly looking for statements about water by the artists in the show. We want to know how it has affected them artistically, personally…and whatever it is about water that has engaged them.
In some cases, these statements are hard to come by. Not so for Henri Matisse, whose Bather (1909) in the collection of the Museum of Modern Art was installed here yesterday. Jack Flam’s invaluable Matisse on Art preserves a number of references to water–at least in the context of Matisse’s Tahiti trip of 1930.
We intend to reprint one of these statements in the free visitors’ booklet that accompanies Water. Another, from Matisse’s 1952 interview with Andre Verdet, is here to whet your appetite for all the Matisses in the show (four works in all, including two post-Tahiti).
Verdet: Did your stay in Tahiti have a great influence on your work?
Matisse: The stay in Tahiti was very profitable…I used to bathe in the lagoon. I swam around the brilliant corals emphasized by the sharp black accents of holothurians. I would plunge my head into the water, transparent above the absinth bottom of the lagoon, my eyes wide open…and then suddenly I would lift my head above the water and gaze at the luminous whole.
Reading this, the meaning of one line in Matisse’s Jazz comes into sharp focus for me: “Lagoons: wouldn’t you be one of the seven wonders of the Paradise of painters?”
