Matisse Before Morocco: Primitive Fauve Women in Collioure

To fully understand the changes in Matisse’s depiction of women, and why they were so important to his development as an artist, it is necessary to first examine the confines of Fauvism on Matisse’s paintings of the opposite sex. Matisse led the Fauve movement, in which he “carried the exaltation of saturated colour to its extreme at Collioure [the south-west of France, a vacation spot of wealthy Parisians] during the summer of 1905” (Perez-Tibi). Fauvism, as defined by the Grove Dictionary of Art, was characterized by its “bold sense of surface design” (Perez-Tibi). Matisse’s major work from this period, Le Bonheur de Vivre, illustrates this Fauvism technique of painting females especially well because it captures a nude pastoral scene of fantastic, wildly-colored women with that same “bold sense of surface design,” defining the phrase “Fauve woman.” Louis Vauxcelles, the primary art critic of the 1906 Salon des Independants Exhibit where this painting was first displayed, identifies the Fauve women as suggestive:

In languorous attitudes some creatures with lovely hips sleep, dream; one, standing, stretches herself, her hands crossed behind her head; others play the flute; at right, a svelte girl throws her arms behind her, enlacing in this fresh collar the head of her lover; The center of the composition, a wild round…the pink of the bodies closely enveloped in a halo of complementary violent, harmonize and blend (qtd. Flam 163).

Vauxcelles’ meticulous observations are clear: this is a spontaneous painting of voluptuous women cavorting in the forest. Although this style of painting developed out of Matisse’s travels to Collioure, nowhere in Le Bonheur de Vivre does Matisse attempt to capture the type of cultured, wealthy woman who would be vacationing in this hangout of the rich. He instead paints them with primitive and passive qualities; these characteristics epitomize the quintessential Fauve woman. Furthermore, this primitiveness presents an important contradiction because Matisse purposely draws the Western, and therefore supposedly cultured, women as very primitive.
More about Fauvism and Le Bonheur de Vivre

matisse1.jpg
BONHEUR DE VIVRE, 1905-1906
Henri Matisse
oil on canvas
The Barnes Foundation, Merion, Pennsylvania