Landscape at Collioure

Henri Matisse, 1905 · Gallery 506 · Floor 5

Ah, Matisse! You can feel the sun coming off this before you can tell what it is. There's a hillside in there. We're in Collioure, a little fishing town near the Spanish border. It's the summer of 1905. Matisse is down there painting with his friend André Derain. He's thirty-five. Fifteen years earlier, he was a law clerk. Then appendicitis put him in bed, and his mother brought him a box of paints. And well... ya know... gave up law. And here he is, making the ground pink. The tree trunks go red. Between the dabs, you can see the raw canvas. He puts paint straight onto it, then leaves a lot of it showing. You might think he's going to come back and fill it in. But he isn't. This is finished. The trees are the wrong color. But the heat feels right. That little trade helps change modern painting. Then comes Paris. That fall, Matisse and the others show their new paintings in a big exhibition. In the middle of their room, somebody's put a tidy little bust of a child. A critic looks at the bust. Looks around at the paintings. Then writes: "Donatello among the wild beasts." Donatello didn't make the bust. The bust just gets to be Donatello. Matisse and his friends get to be animals. Fauves. Wild beasts. The name sticks. Fauvism. You can put it in a textbook now. Years later, Matisse's son-in-law said Matisse still had no idea what Fauvism meant.

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