Sunday

This is Open Window, Collioure, by Henri Matisse (1869-1954).

In the summer of 1905 Matisse invited his friend André Derain to come and spend a few months painting in Collioure, a fishing village in the south of France.

Influenced by Van Gogh, Cézanne and Gauguin - and by the heat and light - they had started using amped-up, hyper-vivid colours, sometimes applying them straight from the tube, i.e. without mixing them first. The idea wasn’t to make exact representations of what a thing looked like, but rather to paint how it felt.

Looking at these paintings 120 years later, a feeling is exactly what you get - a sense of freedom, liberation from convention, heat, light, colour, WHAM. They could have been painted yesterday. They are completely alive.¹

When Matisse, Derain, Maurice de Vlaminck and others of their friends exhibited their shocking new work at the salon d’automne in Paris later that year, the critic Louis Vauxelles called the paintings the work of ‘fauves,’ or wild animals. Hence Fauvism, a short-lived but hugely significant movement that was over by 1908 (it evolved into various things, including Cubism) - except for Matisse.

He wrote: ‘The chief aim of colour should be to serve expression as well as possible […] What I dream of is an art of balance, of purity and serenity devoid of troubling or depressing subject matter, an art which might be for every […] worker […] like a good armchair in which to rest from physical fatigue.’

Note that there is no interplay of light and shade in this painting. Aside from one little patch at the top of the window and that tiny bit of navy around the plant pots, it’s all light. Instead, any sense of perspective comes from the interplay of delicious colours and rectangular window shapes. So you have the paint apparently behaving in a wildly unleashed manner, but you also have straight lines making frames and imposing some order. It’s a bit like gardening, or indeed life: you need structure to offset wildness, otherwise it just looks like chaos.

All of that aside, this is simply a dreamy, euphoric painting of summer, one of the ones that makes you wish you could climb inside it and wander about before strolling down to the harbour for a citron pressé and to see about taking a boat out. I just love it.

PS I’ve just remembered Fauve, the heroine of Judith Krantz’s Eighties novel Mistral’s Daughter. She had red hair and she wore purple and green clothes. Have I made this up? God, how I loved Judith Krantz.

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1. The German Expressionists were trying something similar a couple of years later, but the feelings they painted were somewhat tortured. Matisse and his friends were painting joy.