Badende mit einer Schildkröte

Matisse finished this in early 1908, and within months it had gone to Germany, bought by Karl Ernst Osthaus for his Folkwang museum in Hagen. That German home nearly decided its fate. In 1937 the Nazis stripped modern work from state collections as 'degenerate,' and this canvas was pulled from the walls. Two years later it was sold off at auction in Switzerland, where Joseph Pulitzer Jr. bought it for $2,400. What unsettled those officials is still here to see: three nude bathers on a shore reduced to three flat bands of green, deep blue, and paler blue, one woman crouching to hold out a leaf to a small tortoise.