LANDSCAPE AT COLLIOURE
HENRI MATISSE, 1905
Ah, Matisse! You can feel the sun coming off this before you can even tell what it is. A hillside, supposedly. But up close it's just dabs. Blue, pink, orange, red, like he flung the whole palette at it. Half of it's bare canvas he never filled in. So... it's the summer of 1905. We're in a little fishing village called Collioure, right where France runs into Spain. The light down there is relentless. It comes off the water, off the white walls, and turns the whole place into pure color. Matisse sets up out in it, next to his friend Derain, and he just lets go. He stops making the colors match the world. The tree trunk goes red. The grass turns pink. None of it's true, and that's the point. He's not painting the hillside in front of him. He's painting what it feels like to sit in that much sun. And he's fast. Straight from the tube, one flick, on to the next, chasing the light before it shifts. Not laboring over anything. Just a guy too happy to slow down and color inside the lines. A painting's done the second it's got the feeling, not a moment after. Then comes the fall. He hangs a batch of these in the big Paris show, and people freak out. A critic looks at the whole room and spits out a word. Fauves. Wild beasts. And there's the joke. They're standing in front of the most joyful thing anyone's painted in years, and the only word they've got is animal. The painters loved it. Kept the name. So this sun-soaked little hillside is where it all begins. The day color stopped reporting to reality and went wherever it wanted. He let it off the leash, and thank god, it never came back.