Open Window, Collioure
Henri Matisse
HENRI MATISSE, 1905. OIL ON CANVAS.
From the end of the Renaissance, there was a common consensus that a painting should be like a window. It should be a glimpse into another world that you can peer through the canvas and fall into. Yet for Matisse, a painting should be a painting, and he never illustrated this idea better than his painting of a window. It is not a work of trickery or illusion, he makes no attempts at realism and does not want you to fall into the world he depicts. Instead, he engulfs you in it, with each visible brushstroke and bold colour a stick of dynamite that explodes with vibrancy. It was this very painting that gave a name to Matisse and his contemporaries movement – Fauvism. Upon seeing the painting, hung in a room alongside a renaissance sculpture, the great poet, writer and art collector Getrude Stein remarked ‘Well, well, Donatello among the wild beasts (fauves)’. For all the beautiful domesticity of Matisse’s scene, it is primal, the work of a wild beast reproducing their visceral experiences as it emerges from their mind. Matisse painted a window to show the world how much more painting could be.