Fauvism, Henri Matisse, Colour, painting, Coulioure

1. C&C
OR lets not reinvent the wheel, but instead lets
grapple with how 20th Century art, all the bits you
don’t understand and all the bits you never knew
existed make sense, why they happened and why
it’s integral to your own practise now.

2. Let’s begin by looking at this painting and examining what we understand of this
work.
1

3. Let’s begin with a some questions.
What do you already know about this painting?
What information is the painting offering you?
What is the painting of?
Can you place the painting in a time?
How has the artists treated their materials in this painting?
Can you make links between this painting and other art works?
Does this work fit into a context of an art movement?

4. Henri Matisse, Les toits de Collioure, 1905, , oil on canvas
1)Describethispainting

5. Point to the odd one out
Point to the odd one out!

6. FAUVISM

8. Henri Matisse French b.1869 – d.1954

9. FAUVISM The Wild Beasts
“A kilogram of green
is greener than half
a kilogram of green”
Henri Matisse
What does Matisse mean by this?

10. Henri Matisse
Nature morte aux livres, Bohain,
1890, Oil on canvas
Tate Modern.

11. Henri Matisse
Portrait of Andre Derain
1905 Oil on canvas
Tate Modern.
Andre Derain
Portrait of Henri Mattise
1905 Oil on canvas

12. “If you want your colours to
seem intense, you have to
use more of it.”
“You cannot break up areas into
small blocks of colour. You have to
apply colour on large blocks.”

13. Henri Matisse, Les toits de Collioure
1905, oil on canvas. 59.5 x 73cm
1) Describe this painting

14. Matisse’s blocks of wild colour did
not resemble the real world and
they broke away from established
rules and colour expectations.
Over centuries the craft of painting had been refined and the
use of colour established to follow rules. Light and shadow
was observed to describe form, fine brush strokes created the
illusion of smoothness and an appearance of the observable
world.
At the moment of Fauvism Matisse decides to ignore
everything that had gone before.

15. The liberation of colour
Vincent Van Gogh. Vincent's Bedroom in Arles. 1888. Oil on canvas

16. Michel Eugène
Chevreul
“Principles of
Color Harmony
and Contrast“
1839

17. Michel-Eugène Chevreul (1786-1889)
After an illustrious academic career studying fats and waxes, the chemist
Michel-Eugène Chevreul was appointed by royal decree to be director of dyes
at the national Gobelins textile factory in Paris, where he worked for 28 years
(1824-52) on chemical research and quality assurance in the dyes used for
fine fabrics and textile designs. (He devoted much of his labour to developing
more lightfast blue and violet dyes.) This middle position between organic
chemistry, manufacturing technology and consumer response brought basic
colour problems to Chevreul's attention, in particular the apparent shift in the
depth of black fabric depending on the colours surrounding it.
The Principles of Harmony and Contrast of Colour by Michel-Eugène Chevreul
– is a classic "colour theory" text, published in 1839 as The Law of
Simultaneous Colour Contrast (translated into English in 1854), is an artistic
milestone, one of the first systematic studies of colour perception and a
compendium of colour design principles that many 19th century French
painters from Delacroix to Matisse attempted to apply in their art.

18. colour system / Colour theory
(explained from different viewpoints)

19. Henri Matisse
Open Window
Collioure.
1905
Oil on canvas

20. Henri Matisse
Woman with a Hat.
1905
Oil on canvas
Amedeo Modigliani
Portrait of Woman
in Hat
1917 Oil on canvas
Pablo Picasso
Woman in a
Plummed Hat
1901 Oil on canvas

21. Henri Matisse. The joy of life.
1905. Oil on canvas.
6 feet x 8 feet

22. Henri Matisse.
The joy of life.
1905. Oil on canvas.
6 feet x 8 feet
Paul Cezanne
The Bather.
1898–1905. Oil on canvas

23. Henri Matisse. The Dance. 1910 Oil on canvas. 2.60 m x 3.9 m

24. 1905 Salon d’ Automne, exhibition of works by Henri Matisse, Andre Derain, Maurice
Vlaminck and others. The paintings consisted of strident colours, rough paint handling and
distorted anti-naturalistic drawing.
In the catalogue introduction, for this now infamous show, Art Historian Elie Faure referred
to the painters in the show as young ‘primatives’. The artists affinities with naive art was
emphasized in the show by hanging Henri Rousseau’s disturbing jungle vision, “Hungry
Lion” alongside their work. Collectively this small group of painters were dubbed LES
FAUVES, the wild beasts, and Matisse became the spearhead of the group.
Henri Rouseau
Hungry Lion
1905
oli on canvas

25. Although Matisse was the oldest of the group and the only major artist amongst them it
was Andre Derain (1880 – 1954) and Maurice Vlaminck (1875 – 1958) who were considered
the more gifted painters.
Derain’s “The Pool of London”, 1906, along with his London series of paintings summarise
the Fauve achievements in their exploitations of violent and arbitary use of colour. Derain
called his use of colour “deliberate disharmonies.”
Andre Derain
The Pool of
London.
1906
Oil on canvas

26. The key Fauve paintings is Matisse’s “The Joy of Life”, 1906 (1.75m x 2.39m). In this painting
colour is used even more subjectively than how Derain own use of colour. The forms are so
dramatically simplified that they become pure linear pattern unifying the picture surface
into a single picture plane, not without some lingering reminiscences of Art Nouveau.
The yellows, purples, blues, greens and reds are expressive
of his reaction to the subject, asserting with the utmost
intensity his own personal vision. All naturalist effects have
been abandoned. By freeing colour from its traditional
descriptive role in representation, the Fauves led the way to
the use of colour as an expressive end in itself.
Henri Matisse, The Joy of Life
Art Nouveau c1880 - 1910
1915
Robert Auer

28. The Joy of Life has an ostensible subject and one which might even seem to look back to the
classical pastoral tradition of Arcadia. Such references were avoided in the future.
Friedrich August von Kaulbach (1850 – 1920)
In Arcadia. 1880 oil on canvas
Peter Paul Rubens c1660
Thomas Cole The Arcadian or
Pastoral State 1836

29. In “Harmony in Red”, 1908 Matisse summed up and completed the Fauve Revolution with a
vibrant composition of flat line and flat areas of colour, a brilliant essay in pure childlike
creative play with the most simplest possible pictorial means – a few contrasting warm and
cool colours and some curving and some straight lines. Perspective and modelling have been
abandoned, space has been reduced to a minimum, light has become simply a function of
flat colour, not a reflection from a lighted surface. A child’s simplicity and innocence
bordering on the gauche are combined with an understated sense of decoration. Colour
floods into the room , enveloping the viewer so that they begin to share in the exhilaration
of the artist’s self-identification with his medium.
“What I am after, above all, is expression” wrote Matisse in his “Notes of a painter” in 1908.
Notes of a Painter was widely read and immediately translated into German and Russian.
Matisse set out the method he proposed for an art intended to express emotional responses
with apparent spontaneity and vividness, he avoided saying anything that might be taken for
a direction or program to be followed by others. Matisse’s most telling comment was that his
“choice of colours does not rest on any scientific theory; it is based on observation, on
feeling, on the very nature of each experience”, and that goal was “to reach that state of
condensation of sensation which constitutes a picture.” He also revealed how slowly and
laboriously his paintings were achieved. The paintings apparent spontaneity is quite
misleading. They were in fact, created by a long, progress of continual small adjustments
until the relationship of colour to colour, shape to shape and colour to shape reach what
Matisse felt to be exactly the right balance.

30. As he painted he watched his reactions to every brush stroke and his reactions to his
reactions, and went on painting and repainting until the process gathered of itself, as if out
of a subconscious. Of his paintings, Matisse wrote, that he was “conscious only of the forces
I am using and I am driven on by an idea that I grasp only as it grows with the picture.”
Henri Matisse
Harmony in Red
1908
Oil on canvas

31. Henri Matisse
Les toits de Collioure
1905, oil on canvas
59.5 x 73cm
Write as detailed formal description of this painting.
Include: The use of colour, contrasts, the use of line, composition, application of
the paint, texture, medium.
2

32. Andre Derain French b.1880 – d.1954
1924

33. Andre Derain
Charing Cross Bridge
1906. Oil on canvas

34. Andre Derain, Collioure
1905. Oil on canvas

35. Henri Matisse
Les toits de Collioure
1905, oil on canvas
1) Describe this painting

36. Henri Matisse
Les toits de Collioure
1905, oil on canvas
59.5 x 73cm
Andre Derain
Collioure
1905. Oil on canvas

37. Let’s begin by looking at this painting and examining what we understand of this
work.
2
Use the
sheet
provided
to examine
Matisse’s
painting
again.
What can
you say
about this
work now?

38. The Fauve’s never became a movement, they never developed a consistent artistic theory,
and by 1908 their loose associations began to dissolve.
LOOK AT THESE THINGS AND EXPLORE FAUVISM
Artists:
Henri Matisse
Andre Derain
Maurice Vlamnick
Documentaries:
Modern Masters – Matisse. Alistair Sook
Shock of the New.
HISTORICAL LANDMARKS
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