expressionism and the fauves

still lives

Breaking down the boundary between figure and ground, between painted reality and imagined reality, in painting:the elision of different planes of reality: open windows, pictures within pictures, breaking down the difference between figure and ground

Henri Matisse, The Open Window,1905

Henri Matisse painted Open Window, Collioure in the summer of 1905, when he and André Derain worked together near the Spanish border. The light-filled scene is vibrant and inviting. Blue-hulled boats float on pink waves below a sky banded with turquoise, pink, and periwinkle. These unnatural colors—Derain would later liken them to "sticks of dynamite"—provoked an outrage that year at the Salon d'Automne in Paris.They function in complementary pairs—orange-red masts over blue hulls, red blossoms amid green leaves on the wall, opposing reflections of turquoise and pink. Complements such as these become more intense when seen next to each other. Isolated by bare areas of the canvas, the combinations generate a visual vibrato that keeps our eye fixed on the surface. The angled, out-flung doors invite into the scene, but different brushstrokes in each "zone" set up cross-rhythms that impede recession: wide sweeps in the room's interior, short wavy lines or staccato dabs in the view beyond.

turning road at l'estauqe derain

In this masterpiece, André Derain´s color, glowing in flat-patterned shapes or exploding into sprays of broken brush strokes, is intended more to be expressive of the artist´s feelings than descriptive of the particular landscape. The curving road, the tree trunks and branches, and the choreographed forms of villagers all sway to an integrated rhythm. The harmonious composition controls the brilliant, vibrant colors. The Turning Road is Derain´s most ambitious painting from his Fauve period. The Turning Road is less a spontaneous expression in color than a carefully constructed masterpiece, worked out through preparatory studies.

portrait of madame matisse

Much of its strength resides in its simple geometric structure and in the way in which the colours are combined. Spatial modulation is pared back to a minimum. Effects of light and shadow, which would have added depth to the image, have been translated into planes of colour instead.

blue nude

The Blue Nude was a turning point for Matisse. In this painting he painted the figure entirely from his imagination, rather than from a model. The composition uses echoing curves and arcs which appear to be derived from the body of the nude and which relate the body to the landscape, engaging the human body and the land in an exchange of energy. We also see the figure from more than one viewing point simultaneously, a technique which creates a sense of flux in the painting, and a sense of sculptural reality. The association of this figure with African sculpture, an association made by Matisse in his own sculptural rendering of the same figure, lent a sense of the exotic to this figure. But the omniscient viewpoint of the spectator reinforces the control of the artist and the viewer over the object in the painting: an exotic female.

evolution of matisse

Throughout the 1930s, his paintings became more boldly decorative as the illusion of depth was compressed into solid planes of color. This culminated in his return to the cutout technique

signac (neo impressionism)

a French Neo-Impressionist painter who, working with Georges Seurat, helped develop the Pointillist style. influenced matisse.

fauves

a loose group of early twentieth-century Modern artists whose works emphasized painterly qualities and strong color over the representational or realistic values retained by Impressionism. While Fauvism as a style began around 1900 and continued beyond 1910, the movement as such lasted only a few years, 1904-1908, and had three exhibitions.[1][2] The leaders of the movement were Henri Matisse and André Derain.Art exerted its own reality. Color was a tool of the painter's artistic intention and expression, uncircumscribed by imitation.

Henri Matisse, Luxe, Calme et Volupté

atisse made this painting in the south of France, in the town of Saint-Tropez, while vacationing with family and friends. The forms in the painting—the figures, tree, bush, sea and sky—are created from spots of color, jabs of the brush that build up the picture. Matisse favored discrete strokes of color that emphasized the painted surface rather than a realistic scene. He also used a palette of pure, high-pitched primary colors (blue, green, yellow, and orange) to render the landscape, and then outlined the figures in blue. The painting takes its title, which means "Richness, calm, and pleasure," from a line by the 19th-century poet Charles Baudelaire, and it shares the poem's subject: escape to an imaginary, tranquil refuge.

Henri Matisse, Le Luxe I and II, 1907

classic motif of bathing women

dance

n Dance I, the figures express the light pleasure and joy that was so much a part of the earlier Fauve masterpiece. The figures are drawn loosely, with almost no interior definition. They have been likened to bean bag dolls because of their formless and unrestricted movements. The bodies certainly don't seem to be restrained by way. But don't let this childlike spontaneity fool you. Matisse works very hard to make his paintings seem effortless. The dancers inhabit a brilliant blue and green field. But what exactly does the green represent? Many people would quickly reply, "a grassy hilltop." Okay, but what then is the blue intended to represent? Lectured at MoMA, many listeners would offer that "the blue is the sky that rises above the hill." But even as that was said several others in my group might begin to look frustrated. One might then say, "that's not what I see, the blue is really water moving back into the distance." What Matisse has done here, even in seemingly simple rendering, is use spatial ambiguity to explore one of the key issues in modern painting, the conflict between the illusion of depth and an acknowledgment of the flatness of the canvas. One final point here, did you notice the break in the circle? The hands of the two front dancers are parted. Matisse has been careful to allow this break only where it overlaps the knee so as not to interrupt the continuity of the color. Why do this? The part is often interpreted in two ways, as a source of tension that requires resolution or, as an invitation to us the viewer to join in, after all, the break is at the point closest to our position.

goals of matisse

to discover "the essential character of things" and to produce an art "of balance, purity, and serenity," as he himself put it in his "Notes of a Painter" in 1908.The years 1917-30 are known as his early Nice period, when his principal subject remained the female figure or an odalisque dressed in oriental costume or in various stages of undress, depicted as standing, seated, or reclining in a luxurious, exotic interior of Matisse's own creation. These paintings are infused with southern light, bright colors, and a profusion of decorative patterns. They emanate a hothouse atmosphere suggestive of a harem.

style of fauves

unatural colors, coarse brush strokes, villages in south france where they painted landscapes. familiar with color innovations of van gogh and gaughin.