Matisse's Bathers Analysis

Matisse and Picasso’s Bathers Art and artists appear to be consistently striving forward to something new while still looking over their shoulder at what has come before. A clear example of this can be seen in a sequence of paintings from three different artists, each linked in some way with the prior and yet doing something new: Cézanne’s The Large Bathers, Matisse’s Bonheur de Vivre, and Picasso’s Les Demoiselles d’Avignon. By examining each piece, I will show how one inspired the next and how each artist strove to do something new and perhaps radical. The Large Bathers, being a Post-Impressionist piece, was of a subject often found in more Classical or Neoclassical pieces, that of the bathing nudes. It still incorporated depth in some respects as you can clearly identify bathers and trees in the foreground and more distant, smaller bathers in the background. Despite using a more Impressionistic style of the portrayal of bathers, with broad representative brush strokes and colors, it was not an attempt to represent a specific scene the viewer was looking upon, but one purely of Cézanne’s own creation. It still captured triangular and pyramidal shapes in the careful arrangement in figures so commonly …show more content…
Each painting has a basis in older portrayal of nudes and yet still each contains aspects that are nods to former pieces of art. This is particularly evident in Matisse and Picasso building upon Cézanne’s first steps in stepping away from traditional portrayals of nudes. Each is trying to outdo the past by introducing new aspects and throwing out parts of the old. The leap from Matisse to Picasso’s Les Demoiselles d’Avignon is particularly drastic as it not only incorporated new techniques but also threw out the many of the traditional aspects of the subject of nudes. Each iteration grows beyond the bounds of its predecessors consistently testing what art can