CORY REYNOLDS | DATE 7/29/2015

The Oasis of Matisse

In 1905, Henri Matisse traveled with his wife and daughter to Collioure, France, so that he could paint in the southern light. Alongside his friend and sole visitor, the painter André Derain, he worked non-stop to develop a new language of painting. "The luminous landscapes and portraits that Matisse and Derain produced in Collioure were to be a succès de scandale at that year’s Salon d’Automne and would earn the two artists a new nickname: the 'Fauves' ('wild beasts')," Beatrix Ruf writes in Koenig Books' excellent new survey, The Oasis of Matisse. "They began their quest for a new way of painting by using color planes to create maximum intensity and hence an emotional response or 'sensation' – the term used by Matisse 
– unconnected with the subject of the picture. They abandoned traditional perspective and expressed light by juxtaposing areas of bright color. 
In Matisse’s 1905 portrait of Derain, the sensation of sunlight on the subject’s face is created by a combination of lively, non-naturalistic colors on one side and a large, brightly colored shadow on the other… Matisse saw the young Derain as a liberator from tradition and convention, and expresses this view in this portrait by the use of bright colors and flowing brushstrokes."