Titian, Diana and Actaeon (1551–62)

A handful of works throughout the history of art seem at once to sum up and transcend their moment. They embody the highest aesthetic ideals and aspirations of their authors and their own period, yet at the same time they point backwards to the origins of those ideals and aspirations, and forward to what future generations will extrapolate from them. Henri Matisse’s Bathers by a River (1909–17, Art Institute of Chicago) is one of those remarkable objects. In it, we can discover his lifelong exploration of Arcadian themes and the female body, revisit the sources of his inspiration from the Renaissance to Cézanne, intuit his relationship to Cubism, and more. We can even, from our present vantage point in the twenty-first century, anticipate what Robert Motherwell learned from the painting in the late 1930s, when it hung in the lobby of New York’s Valentin Dudensing gallery.

Moving back in time, there are Cézanne’s late bathers, the three large canvases now in the Philadelphia Museum of Art, the National Gallery, London, and the Barnes Foundation. These monumental gatherings of female nudes in a landscape—the project that Cézanne described as “doing Poussin over entirely from nature”—similarly acknowledge the past, encapsulate the artist’s most profound concerns, and prefigure some of the twentieth century’s seminal masterpieces, among them not only Matisse’s nudes but also Picasso’s Les Demoiselles d’Avignon (1907, Museum of Modern Art).

And then there is