Not many people in the world get to live with a Matisse in the living room — to look at it over time and let it slowly explain itself. To contemplate the pink shutters and teal walls, the orange sail boat masts and periwinkle hulls — the super-real colors that somehow feel precisely right for the southern French fishing village they depict.
“Working before a soul-stirring landscape, all I thought of was making my colors sing, without paying any heed to rules and regulations,” Henri Matisse wrote.
This fall, the Denver Art Museum is inviting visitors to have a taste of what it would be like to sit and listen to 14 color-soaked canvases from Matisse, André Derain, Raoul Dufy, Albert Marquet and Georges Braque, all paintings in the bold palette of the Fauvist movement of which Matisse was leader. So for Matisse and Friends: Selected Masterworks from the National Gallery of Art, in an experimental move, design staff filled the galleries with arm chairs, sofas and end tables topped with vases or a clock, even a bird cage. Get comfortable, they say. Spend a while.
Their inspiration was a quote from Matisse in which he declares: “What I want is an art of purity and tranquility … so that all those who work with their brains … will look on it as something soothing, a kind of cerebral sedative as relaxing in its way as a comfortable arm chair.”
Early 20th century critics and viewers, however, were anything but willing to cozy up to these paintings. The Fauvist movement was named for the French les fauves, meaning wild beasts. It was a brief period, a necessary break from the Impressionist style that opened doors for the successive movements in art — Cubism, Abstraction and Surrealism among them — and a style that Matisse never abandoned.
The words tossed around in association with the movement are far from comforting: wild, inelegant, immediate, radical. Art critic Marcel Nicolle declared Fauvists paintings the work of a child playing with a paint box, saying splashes of color had been juxtaposed without rhyme or reason and declaring it “either raving madness or a bad joke.”
Today, they’re considered masterworks.
“These are massive works for us. They are works that rank among the most cherished, among the most visible, the most important works of every museum, and of course as well the most expensive work in the art market,” says Christoph Heinrich, director of the Denver Art Museum. “We thought, ‘What are we doing with these 14 wonderful works? Why don’t we really understand this as an opportunity to make an experiment?’ And you know, we love to do new things. We love to do things that we haven’t done before. So here, we offer you an encounter with 14 masterworks, with 14 exquisite paintings that you can have a dialogue with, that you can spend time with.”
It’s a rare encounter. These paintings, all from the collection of the National Gallery of Art, seldom leave their home in Washington, D.C., and are on loan only because the National Gallery is currently being renovated.
“Each and every of these works is stunning, brings so much essence of the artists, the circle around Matisse, and tells about a fantastic moment in time,” Heinrich says. “This moment in time when Impressionists got a little pedestrian — everybody was painting Impressionism at the early years of the 20th century. It lost a little of its edge, its power, and there was a new generation that was really eager to take it up and to do something that nobody had done before, and it was a group of painters around Matisse — Demain, the young Braque, the painters that really believed in the power of color, in the immediacy of the visual and the painting.”
Though to the modern eye, the two groups bear much in common — natural landscapes as subjects, visible brushwork and prioritizing expression over exact replication of the world — the artists saw a gulf between themselves.
“The word ‘impressionism’ perfectly characterizes their intentions, for they register fleeting impressions,” Matisse wrote in “Notes of a Painter,” published in 1908. “This term, however, cannot be used with reference to more recent painters who avoid the first impression and consider it deceptive. A rapid rendering of a landscape represents only one moment of its appearance. I prefer, by insisting upon essentials, to discover its more enduring character and content, even at the risk of sacrificing some of its pleasing qualities.”
Matisse found harmony in the composition of everyday objects — the vases, chairs, curtains and sailboats visible through an open window in the harbor. He describes building a harmonious work of art without any superfluous details to “encroach upon the essential elements.” He declared, “the chief aim of color should be to serve expression.”
That theme is also one the design staff picked up, and rather than hanging these paintings on the traditional white walls, they’ve painted the galleries in bold shades lifted right from the canvases — teal, brick red, deep purple.
The paintings burst off the walls, the vivid backdrops enlivening the colors within the frames and creating an immersive feel of having sunk a little further into the works themselves, as though the visitor could live and breathe in the world of pink tree trunks and orange hillsides.
No longer do we see the soft, tender palette of the Impressionists. These artists use bold, vivid colors — they’re explosive. They’re the full brass band.
“The Fauve artists were really interested in, how do we take the elements of art — color, line and shape — and make it more expressive,” says Danielle St. Peter, master teacher for modern and contemporary art at the Denver Art Museum.
Maurice de Vlamick, who compared colors to an orchestra cued up to play the saxophone, trumpet and slide trombone at full blast, wrote: “I made my tubes of paint burst upon my canvas and used nothing but vermilions, chromes, greens and Prussian blue to snarl out what I wanted to say.”
His fellow Fauvist Derain found himself in direct conversation with Impressionist master Claude Monet when his dealer commissioned him to travel to London and make some 50 cityscapes to capitalize on Monet’s commercial success with his paintings of Waterloo Bridge, the Houses of Parliament and the Thames River. Derain was coming from southern France, where he had spent the summer experimenting with color alongside Matisse.
His “View of the Thames,” from 1905, three years after Monet began exhibiting paintings of the foggy city, shows dark blue boats billowing pink smoke, their hulls filled with pink, and a minty green Tower Bridge and Houses of Parliament at the skyline.
“Where Monet is concerned,” Derain wrote to fellow Fauvist Vlaminck, “I adore him despite everything, precisely because of his error, which offers me a precious lesson. Isn’t he right, in the end, with his fugitive and non-lasting color, to render the natural impression which is only an impression and which does not last? As for me, I am seeking something else: what there is in nature, on the contrary, that is fixed, eternal, complex.”
Derain’s London is one of bright patches of contrasting color. Gone is Monet’s attention to replicating the exact color of the Thames’ water at a specific hour of the day. This is a far bolder and wilder claim to the universe.
“Fauvism was our ordeal by fire,” Derain wrote. “No matter how far we moved away from things, it was never far enough. Colors became charges of dynamite.”
In “Mountains at Collioure,” which is from the same year as his London excursion, visible brushwork applied short swipes of lime green, cobalt blue and teal to trees with trunks the color of salmon fillets set against a backdrop of orange, pink and blue hillsides.
“I think in our eyes, today, [Impressionists and Fauvists] do seem very similar, but at the time, when these were exhibited in 1905, to have blue on the mountain in that way, or pink tree stump, that was just too far beyond being descriptive,” St. Peter says.
Rather than hanging wall placards with notes on each painting, the Denver Art Museum staff put leatherbound binders that pair quotes from the artist and photographs of the areas they painted with close-up shots of the paintings themselves. The audio guide focuses not on art history, but on cultivating an experience of looking closely at the artwork.
“This isn’t a Fauve 101 show. It’s really about the experience of these paintings,” says St. Peter. “We really wanted to think about how to treat them as guests of honor here at the Denver Art Museum. It’s rare that they leave Washington, D.C., so we know that this is a really significant loan for us, so we wanted to treat them in a really unique and special way, a way that maybe people haven’t experienced them in the past.”
There’s just one teal loveseat on which to sit to see Matisse’s small in size, but huge in reputation “Open Window,” which hangs on a wall in the corner by itself while most of the rest of the paintings are shown in pairs.
“I do understand that there might be people who are like, standing in line to go sit in front of the Matisse,” St. Peter says. “But I guess it’s a good problem to have, right, when you have people who want to sit and spend time with it.”
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