Matisse, Henri. Joy of Life. 1906. Barnes Foundation, Merion Pa.
By contrast, Matisse’s paintings attempt to revise this concept of woman as evil by creating a positive image of women, a celebration of femininity in works like Joy of Life. Matisse’s attitudes towards women were clearly different from Cézanne’s. He wrote that he both emphasized and praised the female form in his art because this figure “best permits me to express my almost religious awe towards life” (qtd Wilson 7). This desire to depict his “awe towards life” comes through not only in Joy of Life but in many of his paintings that utilize the nymph motif. This expression of Matisse’s amazement at life through the female form goes back to the notion of woman as the source of all life. This clearly is not coherent with Cézanne’s portrayal of women as the source of evil and temptation. So, if Matisse were seeking to revise Cézanne’s depiction of women in Three Bathers, the question then becomes, why was the painting such an inspiration to him?
Three Bathers was not influential to Matisse for its message but rather for its artistic merit. This is made clear in a letter Matisse wrote to the director of the Musée Petit Palais, “Allow me to tell you that [Three Bathers] is of the first importance in the works of Cézanne because it is a very solid, very complete, realization of a composition that he carefully studied in various canvases, which, though now in important collections, are only studies that culminated in the present work” (qtd in Krumrine et al 34). This letter was about the painting Three Bathers and shows that the reason Matisse admired it was because of Cézanne’s superior technique. His feeling that Cézanne’s technique was superior is further demonstrated in that Matisse also wrote, “Cézanne is the master of us all” (Durozoi 11), and referred to him as “a sort of god of painting” (Flam 20). Yet for all that it must have been difficult for Matisse to acknowledge that the man he looked up to as a “master” and a “god” could be wrong wrong, Matisse did, and ultimately it is because of this that he sought to revise Cézanne’s women. By celebrating women in his own artwork while attempting to copy Cézanne’s skill as an artist, Matisse was able to correct, as best he could, what he saw as an inaccurate depiction of women as dangerous and deceitful.