C&COR 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.

Let’s begin by looking at this painting and examining what we understand of this

work.

1

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?

Henri Matisse, Les toits de Collioure, 1905, , oil on canvas

1) D

escrib

e th

is pain

ting

Point to the odd one out

Point to the odd one out!

FAUVISM

Henri Matisse French b.1869 – d.1954

FAUVISM The Wild Beasts

“A kilogram of green is greener than half a kilogram of green”

Henri Matisse

What does Matisse mean by this?

Henri Matisse

Nature morte aux livres, Bohain,

1890, Oil on canvas

Tate Modern.

Henri Matisse

Portrait of Andre Derain

1905 Oil on canvas

Tate Modern.

Andre Derain

Portrait of Henri Mattise

1905 Oil on canvas

“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.”

Henri Matisse, Les toits de Collioure

1905, oil on canvas. 59.5 x 73cm

1) Describe this painting

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.

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

Michel EugèneChevreul

“Principles of Color Harmony and Contrast“

1839

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.

colour system / Colour theory (explained from different viewpoints)

Henri Matisse

Open Window

Collioure.

1905

Oil on canvas

Henri Matisse

Woman with a Hat.

1905

Oil on canvas

Amedeo Modigliani Portrait of Woman in Hat1917 Oil on canvas

Pablo PicassoWoman in a Plummed Hat1901 Oil on canvas

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

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

Paul CezanneThe Bather. 1898–1905. Oil on canvas

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

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 RouseauHungry Lion1905oli on canvas

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 DerainThe Pool of London.1906Oil on canvas

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

1915Robert Auer

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 c1660Thomas Cole The Arcadian or Pastoral State 1836

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.

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 MatisseHarmony in Red1908Oil on canvas

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

Andre Derain French b.1880 – d.1954

1924

Andre DerainCharing Cross Bridge1906. Oil on canvas

Andre Derain, Collioure1905. Oil on canvas

Henri Matisse

Les toits de Collioure

1905, oil on canvas

1) Describe this painting

Henri MatisseLes toits de Collioure1905, oil on canvas59.5 x 73cm

Andre DerainCollioure1905. Oil on canvas

Let’s begin by looking at this painting and examining what we understand of this

work.

2Use the sheet provided to examine Matisse’s painting again. What can you say about this work now?

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 MatisseAndre DerainMaurice Vlamnick

Documentaries:Modern Masters – Matisse. Alistair SookShock of the New.

HISTORICAL LANDMARKSAbortive revolution in RussiaEinstein, Special Theory of RelativityFive cent cinema opens in Pittsburgh