Matisse, Henri - Open Window, Collioure (1905)

The Day the Sun Broke Through the Window

In 1905 the art world caught a fever. Henri Matisse went to the south of France and brought back something that looked like it had been painted with liquid fire. He stood in a small room in Collioure and looked out at the Mediterranean. He did not see the polite pastel blue of the Impressionists. He saw pink masts and turquoise water and walls that bled orange.

When he showed this at the Salon d’Automne the critics lost their minds. One man called Matisse and his circle wild beasts. They thought the paintings were a violent insult to the eyes. They were used to blended colors and careful shadows. Matisse gave them raw pigment slapped onto the canvas with an intensity that felt personal. It was a riot of unblended strokes that refused to apologize for being loud.

If you look closely at Open Window you can see the bare canvas peeking through. Most painters of the time would have seen that as a failure or a lack of finish. To Matisse it was light itself. He was not trying to copy a view like a camera. He was trying to capture the physical heat of standing in that doorway while the French sun cooked the earth outside.

This was the moment Impressionism died. It stopped being about how light hit an object and started being about how a color hit a soul. Matisse used green for the shadows on a window frame because green felt right. He used red for the masts because red felt hot. It was dishonest to the eyes but perfectly honest to the heart. This was not just a window. It was the door being kicked open to the modern world.

References

Elderfield, John. The Wild Beasts Fauvism and Its Affinities. New York: Museum of Modern Art, 1976.

Matisse, Henri. Matisse on Art. Edited by Jack Flam. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1995.

Spurling, Hilary. The Unknown Matisse A Life of Henri Matisse, 1869-1908. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1998.

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