Here we meet our two artists, and we have a portrait of Matisse by Derain, and a portrait of Derain by Matisse. Derain’s portrait of Matisse is a masterpiece of fauve painting. It has an extraordinary expression, a great energy, a great verve to it, and as you can see from Matisse’s brush work, he’s working at a much faster pace, dashing off this painting, which as well, is full of energy. They were blown away by the brilliance of the light, and that really was a spur that enabled them to go much further, both in expressive brushwork, and particularly in this wonderful, vibrant color. In June of 1905, Henri Matisse sent a postcard to his younger friend, André Derain, urging him to travel south to join him in Collioure, a small fishing village in the South of France, 10 miles from the Spanish border. He wrote, “I cannot insist too strongly that a stay here is absolutely necessary for your work. You would find yourself in the best possible conditions, and you would reap pecuniary advantages from the work you could do here. I am certain that if you take my advice you will be glad of it. This is why I say to you again, come.” “Vertigo of Color: Matisse, Derain, and the Origins of Fauvism” brings together the paintings, drawings and watercolors of Henri Matisse and André Derain, made in the South of France in the summer of 1905. Their extraordinary experiments in color and brushwork would forever change the course of French art. It was just about nine weeks that the two artists worked side by side on the French coast, but it was an artistic adventure for both of them, and it’s not an exaggeration to say that the results of that time turned French painting on its head. This exhibition explores this pivotal moment in the careers of two great French artists of the 20th century. It’s important at the outset to discuss why we’ve titled the exhibition, “Origins of Fauvism.” Fauvism was a word coined at the Salon d’Automne in the fall of 1905 in Paris. These artists showed the products of their summer in Collioure. Matisse showed five paintings and some watercolors. Derain showed six. Their works in that exhibition caused an absolute outrage, a storm of criticism. The critics just did not know how to deal with it. They couldn’t find the words to write about what they were seeing, and it was a critic writing about the Salon d’Automne that came up with the term, “fauve,” a French word meaning “wild animals” or “wild beasts,” because these paintings to their eyes were so sort of vehement and out of control. So what were they doing in Coullioure, and how were they changing the narrative in French art? Matisse was often interviewed through his long life and he reflected on his weeks in Coullioure, his days with Derain, in the following way. “We were at that time like children in the face of nature, and we let our temperaments speak, even to the point of painting from the imagination when nature herself could not be used.” Matisse at this time was 35 years old. He’d actually come to painting relatively late, not till he was about 21, and he studied in the studio of Eugène Carrière, which is where he met Derain. André Derain had only been painting as an artist for a few years when he joined Matisse in the South of France. So this was really an extraordinary beginning for Derain as a painter. He recognized that he was in the company of a great master. Derain always intended to finish his paintings, to reach their moment of completion as he painted, whereas Matisse, he’s working at a much faster pace, dashing off this painting, which as well is full of energy, but it’s much more of a sketch in oil. He wanted to do drawings and watercolors for the most part as resources for his studio. He wanted to give time and thought to his palette and to his brushwork, and so these were experiments for him. They were exercises to liberate himself from everything he inherited, and to start on a new path. I like very much the way that both artists have used slightly arbitrary color, as well as naturalistic color. In the Derain, we’ve got this very bold green shadow down the one side of Matisse’s face, and that little red and green highlight underneath the other eye. Matisse also is doing sort of somewhat the same kind of thing. Look at that viridian green on the proper right cheek of Derain. This is Matisse in the process of his investigations color-wise. Here we’re looking at a painting by André Derain, “Sailboats at Collioure,” and in fact this whole first gallery is devoted to Derain, and he in particular was fascinated by the subject of the port and the fishing boats in Collioure. I think this is really a work of art of great significance, both technically and in brushwork. It has that blurred vision between abstraction and reality. Here Derain is not only using white as an overall ground color, but he’s integrating white actually into the structuring of his palette. And so throughout this exhibition you see these very blocky brushstrokes. Of course, by dividing brushstrokes in this way, it enabled these artists to create light, to actually model the light of the Mediterranean. And then he just suggests really what things are, you know the beach, and then the shape of the boats, by these little sort of dabs of color, which are coming out of the much tinier dots. This was really a very radical way of approaching a subject. This is a star painting in the exhibition, “Fishing boats at Collioure,” by André Derain. Compared to some of the others, which he has a slightly lighter touch, this is very finished and very accomplished, and I find it extraordinary for such a young artist right at the beginning of his career, that he can pull off a work like this that has so much confidence and authority. You’re absolutely right. I’ve always been drawn to these blue shadows on these cascading sails. Derain wrote that the light was so strong, it didn’t cast shadows as one might imagine, but rather the shadows bore their own light. The thing I love about it too, is the rhythm of the sails. You know, he makes the contours a sort of richer orange, and there’s a very nice rhythmic progression across the canvas with the sails, and also you get a sense of the landscape behind. Light was so powerful and so luminous. He said, “It’s the light, a blonde light, golden, which suppresses the shadows. It’s maddening work. Everything I’ve done up till now strikes me as stupid.” We’ve devoted this gallery to Henri Matisse, and you’ll see a variety of works here, watercolors, oil sketches, a few finished masterpieces, studies for a painting that he finished off in his studio in Paris. So this is certainly one of my favorite paintings in the exhibition, and I think it’s fair to say it’s really a great masterpiece of fauvist painting. We’re looking here at a painting that Matisse made looking out from the window of his studio, the Port d’Avall, a cove in Collioure. Obviously, he’s in the first instance stimulated by what he sees in the world around him, but then I think his mind very quickly starts transforming that into almost sort of abstract color relationships. And so we see here one of the great liberating forces of fauvism, is that it encouraged these artists to use color, I think, in a very personal, very subjective way. I imagine the walls were probably just white, but look what he does with them. He makes them this wonderful sort of singing turquoise, and then he outlines the two doors of the French window in this red. So it’s really a very hot palette, and yet he manages to cool it off as it drifts out to sea, by making the pinks and the turquoise. They’re chiming in with the dominant palette of the composition, but in a much more looser, and perhaps one might even say, slightly more lyrical way in the distance. And he’s testing brushwork, moving into a very rhythmic style of brushwork in the near ground, and then a more linear, as you said, more peaceful, quiet brushwork as he outlines the boats bobbing at their moorings. One fascinating thing I think we both found working on this show was that both artists wrote quite a lot of letters to their friends, so we know quite a lot about how they were experiencing the place. One thing that’s perhaps a little surprising to read about, is the painting seemed so spontaneous and joyful and full of happiness. You’d think they were having just a absolutely wonderful time. They were having a sort of amazingly exhilarating time artistically, but they were both extremely anxious. They knew that they had embarked on a big venture. They were literally forging a new pictorial language. They intended to exhibit this work when they got back to Paris in the fall. They were concerned about how it would be received, and you sense none of that in this painting, but that’s the reality of the way they were thinking. In this gallery, we have a number of Derain’s port scenes, but we also find him exploring the landscape beyond the port. And in this view, he’s looking at the mountains, these sort of lower slope foothills really, of the Pyrenees, that come right down to Collioure, and create a lovely backdrop to the port and the village. But look how animated this painting is. I mean, the mountains are undulating with these great long, sweeping strokes, and this sort of ultramarine blue-green sky, and great long sweeping strokes again to suggest the clouds. But then in the foreground we are back to this sort of, what I call this blocky technique, with these sort of very strong, tough brushstrokes, these repeated parallels in which he creates the trees in a rather vivid orange, but the whole thing is absolutely bursting with life and energy. One really has a sense of weight and volume in the foreground, relative I think, to the mountains. Yes, and yet again we see, as we’ve seen so often in Derain’s work at Collioure, he leaves a lot of the white priming of the canvas showing through, both in the foreground, you know, in the trees, and presumably the undergrowth below the trees, and in the mountains beyond. Derain also daringly used gray, a sort of mid-shade gray, and actually in this marvelous view, looking down at the port from the foothills of the Pyrenees, he’s integrated the gray ground right into his composition, just dotting this lower region here with a few red dots to suggest foliage and vegetation, and I think that’s absolutely marvelous. The gray would tend to rather darken the palette of a painting, whereas this does just glow actually, with light. We can see the ease, I think here, from which Derain shifts from local color, that is the color of the actual landscape, or the green leaves of the trees, into a much more imaginary color in those brilliant oranges and yellows of the mountains behind. And it’s very interesting, I think, to see this painting in comparison with one by Matisse, also a landscape painted in the hinterland, using these very loose, broken brushstrokes, and leaving a lot of the canvas exposed. I mentioned earlier that Matisse was well aware that he was actually collecting a body of sketches to use in his studio in Paris, and indeed “Landscape at Collioure” is one of three examples in the exhibition where he was preparing himself for a large-scale painting he had already begun in his studio in Paris, one of the most important masterpieces of his early career, “The Joy of Life”, that’s in the collection of the Barnes Foundation in Philadelphia. It’s wonderful to look at these very closely and recognize that he was in the same glade in the woods, in the foothills above Collioure, for each of them. You will see that he was developing his landscape for this magnum opus of his early years, before actually introducing figures, instead of doing the reverse, which is a fascinating way of working actually, and rather unusual. And Matisse once said, I think around this time, that he really only works in about four or five colors, and he tries to make them either clash, or really sort of bounce off against each other. And what we, really seeing here, is both the touch, the brushwork, and I think particularly the color, is being used purely to express his own personal vision of the place, and his own feelings about it, rather than anything approaching naturalism or realism. He’s subverting the canon of landscape. This has no relationship whatsoever to the naturalistic landscape that he inherited in the tradition of French painting. Bear in mind for us, in both of these paintings it seems perfectly fine to see red mountains and red tree trunks, but in 1905 it was considered shocking. We have to continually remind ourselves that what we’re so at ease today with was a radical departure in 1905. Matisse returned to Paris with 40 watercolors. They’re relatively unknown in the many exhibitions devoted to the work of Henri Matisse. So these are the bell tower of the church in the port of Collioure, you see figures sitting on the beach overlooking the sails, and only in the sky is there a density of pigment. Otherwise it’s very fluid, aqueous watercolor. In “The Barques at Faubourg,” this is a wonderful rhyming image of masts, as they bob in the wind. It’s such an intimate glimpse into Matisse’s process at this time, and what he’s working out in Collioure. I mean, he probably wouldn’t have actually considered exhibiting most of these. I mean, they’re really sort of working notes. Yes, watercolor was portable, it was also fast-drying. He could work in the landscape in watercolor and manage to carry them back to his studio with no trouble at all. This is where Matisse in this exhibition really diverges from Derain. A great many of the works by Derain show a young ambitious artist trying to finish very highly-resolved paintings to take back to Paris to make his mark. Whereas I think Matisse’s work, it’s much more investigative. He’s experimenting, very much as raw material. There’s a great confidence to the coloring of these watercolors, but he’s using watercolor very sparingly. Yeah, very sparing, leaves a lot of the white sheet empty. That gives it a very fresh feeling. It doesn’t have a sense of having been sketched a century ago. And there’s a lovely simplicity about them, and a spontaneity that really still communicates itself. There’s another player in this very important aesthetic dialogue, and that is Amélie Matisse, Henri Matisse’s wife. She was a wonderful wife, a wonderful mother, and indeed she modeled for the two artists in Collioure as often as they wished, and we have devoted this wall to imagery of Madame Amélie Matisse. Amélie Matisse swore she would never marry a redhead, or a man with a beard, or a painter. Matisse was all three. She fell madly in love with him at the age of 25, and stood by him for more than 30 years. Alas, not until his death, but that’s the story of another exhibition. There was no way to find willing models in the summer of 1905 in a fishing village. It wasn’t a culture that the residents of Collioure would’ve embraced or even have understood, and she posed for Matisse and Derain, both in the foothills of the village and on the beach, and indeed she is so important to their practice in Collioure. This is a wonderful little pen-and-ink drawing from The Met’s collection, and it’s so wonderful to have this, because it is actually Derain sketching Matisse, who’s sketching his wife, Amélie. It gives us a real glimpse into this very close, easygoing, intimate friendship that existed that summer between Derain, and not only Matisse, but Amélie and her children as well. It reminds us, and it documents the fact that the two artists were working together at the seashore, so we have a documentary proof that they were all together, working in one place. This is really one of the great works in the show, I think one of the great works of that whole summer at Collioure. This portrait of Amélie by Derain is titled “Woman in a Shawl, Madame Matisse in a Kimono.” But again, I think she was a figure enabling Derain to consider his colors, and indeed he is in full glory exercising those green and red polarities, while animating her central figure with this marvelous kimono. I love the informality of her pose, and the way she’s just holding that red fan. I love too, the way that the patterns on the kimono are quite representational, but the background is just this kind of wonderful abstract play of color. Derain is really expressing himself with great freedom and authority here. “La Japonaise” is really one of the most impressive, extraordinary, and magnificent paintings by Matisse. It’s a figure painting, but you can barely make out her figure, wearing this blue and white kimono. This is really one of the finest examples of Matisse using different blocky brushstrokes and then linear brushstrokes throughout this small, powerful canvas. Yet when he decides to actually introduce the kimono, you have this pulsating rhythm of blue strokes. It must have been a marvelous prop for him to paint. I think Matisse and Derain were very shocked by the strength of the outrage and the negative criticism, and they must have been very hurt by it. However, it has to be said that in the end it was very beneficial to both their careers, simply because of the attention they attracted. Either of them had not exhibited very much in Paris before, and suddenly they were at the center of critical attention. I think in a way we see a summing up of this extraordinarily daring and experimental summer with these two artists working so closely together and learning from each other, and really forging a new pictorial language, a new way of approaching composition, but particularly color, as a really powerful force of self-expression, and liberating it from any requirements of description, which of course went on to have such a lasting and enduring impact throughout the development of modern art in the 20th century. Who could have known that two artists who hardly knew one another, meeting in a small village in the South of France for a summer, could have had that consequential impact on the shaping of modern art. It was really thanks to them that modern artists could use color as they wished. For making this exceptional presentation possible at The Met, we thank the Florence Gould Foundation, and an anonymous foundation. The catalog is the result of the generosity of the Janice H. Levin Fund. to the Marlene and Spencer Hays Foundation, and the Mellon Foundation for their additional support. On behalf of everyone at The Met, thank you for joining us.