This lecture discusses the forthcoming exhibition (winter 2024) at the Saint Louis Museum of Art of the same title. The exhibition is the first ever to examine the influence of the sea across modernist artist Henri Matisse’s career, which included painting in coastal locations on the Mediterranean, the Atlantic, and the Pacific. The lecture will explore the importance of Matisse’s marine imagery across a wide range of media from paintings to ceramics to textiles and paper cut-outs. It will offer a particular focus on the iconic coastal picture, Bathers with a Turtle (1908, Saint Louis Art Museum), exploring the genesis and afterlife of this painting.
About the speaker: Simon Kelly is Curator of Modern and Contemporary Art at the Saint Louis Art Museum. Kelly is the curator a series of important major exhibitions focused on French nineteenth-century art and sometimes on its legacy—shows like Millet and Modern Art: From Van Gogh to Dalí (2020), Paul Gauguin: The Art of Invention (2019) and Degas, Impressionism, and the Paris Millinery Trade (2017). In a practice that is somewhat unusual among museum curators, he regularly publishes research beyond that which centers on his exhibitions. He is an important scholar of both late Monet and Barbizon painting.
