Luxe, Calme et Volupte

Nude bathers relax on a Mediterranean shore beside a moored boat, the whole sun-drenched idyll rendered in a mosaic of vivid, separate dabs of pure color. Matisse took his title from a refrain by Baudelaire - luxury, calm, and pleasure - and built the scene using the Neo-Impressionist dot, but charged it with new, arbitrary brilliance. Now in the Musee d'Orsay, Luxe, Calme et Volupte is a pivotal work - the bridge from Seurat's scientific Pointillism toward the wild, liberated color of Fauvism that Matisse was about to unleash on the world.