Henri Matisse's Great Leap Forward

Bathers with a Turtle, 1908
During the period leading up to the years covered by the show, Matisse abandoned the hectic charms of Fauvism, the style which helped make him famous, and moved to distill and stabilize his art by conjuring up a stripped-bare world of preclassical antiquity, a place that was one part arcadia, one part Land That Time Forgot. In enigmatic pictures like Bathers with a Turtle, bluntly rendered figures were disposed among wide, flat bands of nearly abstract blue and green that signified — just barely — land, sea and air.

• Article: Great Leap Forward