Vertigo of Color: Matisse, Derain, and the Origins of Fauvism

Introduction

In the early summer of 1905, Henri Matisse invited his young friend André Derain to join him on the French Mediterranean for a few weeks of painting and drawing. Their fabled partnership in the small fishing village of Collioure would forever change the course of French painting. In freewheeling experiments, they explored color and light on the beaches and in the surrounding hills, exercises that led their contemporaries to reconsider the nature of brushwork and the role of color in their practice. When the astonishing new paintings were shown at the Salon d’Automne in Paris, critics derided their radical departure from convention. One critic called these artists les Fauves (literally “wild beasts”).

So, what were Matisse and Derain doing in Collioure that caused such a stir? They redefined color in the natural world. Rather than painting perceptually, loyal to nature’s hues, they relied on their own sensations, processing color through experience. Experimenting with pinks and lavenders in a forest of cork oak trees was bold and daring. Similarly, primary colors straight from the tube “heated” paintings of Collioure’s port. With Fauvism, color took on a role of its own, and brushwork varied from blended strokes to blocky marks. In the end, the Collioure experiments were less a cohesive discourse in paint than a liberating realignment of color—an important step on the way to modernism as we know it today.

This exhibition is made possible by The Florence Gould Foundation.

Additional support is provided by an Anonymous Foundation.

The exhibition is organized by The Metropolitan Museum of Art and the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston.

Read, watch, or listen to stories about the exhibition on The Met website.

metmuseum.org/VertigoOfColor

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André Derain (1880–1954)

Color became sticks of dynamite. They were primed to discharge light.

— André Derain

André Derain traveled to Collioure in early July 1905 at the invitation of Henri Matisse. Brimming with enthusiasm and impetuous energy, Derain painted ambitiously from the start, and by August returned to Paris with thirty finished canvases, almost all port scenes painted in a dazzling array of saturated colors. Reds, greens, yellows, and blues appear throughout his imagery in brushwork alternately spare and heavily laden. From patches of unmodulated color to broken brushmarks barely suggesting descriptive arrangements, Derain was on a new path in his art, examining color as it “discharged light.” Emboldened by daily exchanges with Matisse, Derain’s radiant palette redefined the role of color in a new visual language. Who could have imagined that a chance partnership in a quiet fishing village would ultimately set the stage for an important thread of early modernism known as Fauvism?

Henri Matisse (1869–1954)

A color for me is a force. My paintings consist of four or five colors which clash with one another expressively. When I apply green, that does not mean grass. When I apply blue, that does not mean sky.

— Henri Matisse

Henri Matisse discovered vibrant Mediterranean light while visiting the artist Paul Signac in Saint-Tropez in 1904. The following summer he settled in the picturesque fishing village of Collioure, accompanied by his family and later André Derain. Amid the sparkling waters, medieval ramparts, and majestic mountains, Matisse experienced color and light in a wholly new atmosphere. Largely abandoning descriptive color, he found ways to translate his own sensations, experimenting daringly in paint, watercolor, and pen and ink. Matisse saw his Collioure paintings and drawings as source material for his Paris studio practice. Indeed, he produced several of his most important early masterpieces in the following years. Matisse would introduce a generation of young artists to this new visual language, and together the group came to be known as Fauves.

Amélie Matisse as Model

For nudes, I go every morning at six to the woods in the mountain with my wife who poses calmly; we have gone there a dozen times and have never been bothered.

— Henri Matisse

Amélie Matisse posed tirelessly for her husband and for Derain throughout the summer of 1905 in Collioure. Models were scarce or nonexistent in a small fishing village unaccustomed to the practices of energetic young artists. Amélie posed on quiet beaches and inland in the private surroundings of hillside cork oaks and umbrella pines. Often sporting a colorful blue-and-white robe, she was painted in oil or watercolor, or drawn in jet-black ink. As posing in the nude was unheard of in Collioure, she would sit for her husband in the early hours of the morning. Amélie was indispensable to her husband and was nowhere more important to his artistic practice than in that small French Mediterranean village where the young Matisse and Derain hatched Fauvism.

Watercolors

Matisse shifted freely from one medium to another that summer in 1905, working in oil, watercolor, or pen and ink. He admittedly resisted embarking on ambitious canvases, preferring instead to gather source material for his Paris studio practice. Matisse painted as many as forty watercolors in Collioure, several of which are exhibited here. Unlike more overtly robust experiments in his portfolio that summer, the watercolors are delicate; colors are never combined; subjects are peaceful. And yet there is a pervasive search for imagery in the spare use of medium where the white of the paper suggests ambient light.

Watercolor materials are portable; they traveled well from beaches to the hillside and back. Today, Matisse’s watercolors are rarely seen, mostly residing in private collections.

Drawings

Matisse made nearly one hundred drawings in Collioure. He generally worked in pen and ink, but sometimes in crayon. His studies of the port were drawn from his studio overlooking the Port d’Avall, one of the many coves that made up the harbor in the small coastal village. It is said that his graphic observations were so accurate that fishermen could tell the time of day, sometimes even the precise hour at which the drawings were made. Summary in handling, the ink drawings offer marvelous vignettes of maritime life – sardine and anchovy fishing.

Portraits

Although Matisse and Derain spent most of their days sketching and sometimes painting outdoors, they produced several remarkable portraits in the studio. Amélie Matisse was a willing model, as was their great friend, the artist Etienne Terrus, who lived in the nearby village of Elne. Overall, the portraits of Collioure are more about painting and the autonomy of brushwork than naturalism.

Perhaps the most remarkable portraits from the summer of 1905 are the reciprocal likenesses Matisse and Derain painted of each other. Affirmations of their nourishing, productive partnership, these paintings bring to confident realization their many experiments in brushwork and color that summer.

Still Lifes

While landscapes, seascapes, and portraits feature prominently in the Collioure paintings and drawings, still lifes appear to have had a lesser role, if they figured at all. Derain paid no attention to the genre, preferring instead to experiment with his newfound color palette at the port of Collioure. Matisse collected fresh, local produce for his still-life arrangements, paintings which may date to 1905 or a subsequent summer. Matisse and his family returned to the Mediterranean village for many summers, and even one winter. His still lifes in this exhibition provide another platform for investigations of color and form, and their interrelationships.

Beyond the Summer of 1905

As a coda to the exhibition, this selection of paintings demonstrates how the experiments of the Collioure summer followed Matisse to Paris and Derain to London in 1906. Derain never returned to Collioure, though he did occasionally paint again in the south of France. Derain’s Fauve colors surface in his magnificent works of 1906 when he was in London painting the Houses of Parliament. Matisse returned to Collioure on several occasions throughout the next decade, usually for the summer months. While his concentration slowly shifted from the abstractions of the previous year to a more decorative style, he never lost his drive to translate momentary sensations into ravishing imagery.