Prof. John Klein talks about Henri Matisse’s relationship with the sea (Alan Zhou | Student Life)

John Klein, professor of art history and archaeology at Washington University, lectured on the Saint Louis Art Museum’s (SLAM’s) spring exhibition “Matisse by the Sea” at an event hosted by the French Department, Feb. 20.

Klein is known internationally for his research on Matisse and early 20th-century art. He began his speech to around 40 people by showcasing Matisse’s stylistic shift from painting dark still lifes to painting brightly colored, abstract images. 

He displayed Matisse’s “The Red Beach” (1905), an oil portrait of the port of Collioure, and highlighted the painting’s vibrant red shoreline. He said the use of bright red was typical in fauvism, which is the style of art produced by Matisse and André Derain who were labeled by art critics as “wild beasts,” or fauves in French.

Klein elaborated on the effect of Matisse’s radical use of color in the oil composition “Collioure (La Moulade)” (1905), which depicts the rough open sea near the port of Collioure with waves crashing into the rocks of the shore, all painted in bold blues and greens with thick brushstrokes. 

He said the thick brushstrokes and bold colors are Matisse’s response to the wildness of the scene. 

“His goal here and elsewhere is not to describe the scene but to express his response to the scene,” Klein said. “This area of the ocean seems to have been a kind of agitated and violent.”

Klein spoke about how Matisse’s response to the sea was the focus of the new SLAM exhibit

and said the exhibit splits Matisse’s relationship with the sea into two parts: the sea as location, and the sea as a connector between countries.

“The sea is the place that he often visited or lived in,” he said. “So, these seas are the sites of his paintings, but the exhibition also treats the concept of a sea as a connector of Europe to distant, sometimes nearby lands of non-Europe and specifically North Africa, West Africa, and Polynesia.”

Klein spoke about how Matisse and other European artists collected art from non-Western regions and said that African art had a more symbolic interpretation of the body than European art, referencing the enlarged proportions of the female figure in African statues. 

“They weren’t like Academy-trained artists who were very careful about anatomical correctness,” Klein said. “Instead, the African artist is much more interested in the expressive possibilities of body parts.”

He continued the discussion on the artistic treatment of female bodies by talking about the centerpiece of the SLAM exhibit, “Bathers with Turtle.” The painting features a trio of nude women an allustion to the classical theme of the Three Graces, but their bodies are muscular and highly contoured, with the woman at the center of the image biting her hand. 

Klein pointed to the connections between “Bathers with Turtle” and one of the sculptures in Matisse’s collection of a woman with her hands in a similar biting position. 

“It’s certainly a potential that the treatment of the body and the features in a sculpture like this had an impact on how Matisse and other artists treated the body in their own paintings and sculptures because nobody would claim that these three figures represent a European ideal of feminine beauty,” he said. 

Klein said that art historians are confused about the meaning of the brown turtle in the painting. 

“It seems odd that there should be a turtle, or more properly a tortoise, because it’s probably a Mediterranean box tortoise,” he said. “Tortoises are land animals, turtles are sea animals. There, you have that distinction.”

He also questioned the common assumption that the woman on her knees with what appears to be a piece of food is feeding the turtle. He asked the audience to imagine if the woman was taking food from the turtle instead.

“You don’t want to think that they’re teasing the turtle, you want a nice interpretation,” Klein said. “The fact is that the painting shows us an action but we cannot interpret what that action is.”