KAREN WILKIN
81
Fauvism
Most of the Fauvist pictures look remarkably fresh. It's still a daring
thing to set apparently pure touches of color side by side with no
thought of the tempering effects of traditional light and shade . Visible
response to Signac's theories about color and, on trips to the south, re–
sponse to a light- drenched landscape. Matisse's color heats up, becomes
the building block of the painting. When he is doubtful, he leans on
Cezanne, relating warm and cool color planes (however intensified the
hues) with an eye to Cezanne's vibrating touches. Time of experimenta–
tion, testing of possibilities, manifest in a kind of antiphonic contest be–
tween Signac-inspired stutters of colored lines and Cezanne-inspired
rock-solid structure. One extreme risks fragmenting form into unrecog–
nizeability, the other risks inertia. In the best pictures of this period, daz–
zling color evokes brilliant light without depicting its effects, and this
purely painted evocation of light, in turn, reveals the physicality of the
world around us.
Danger: full-throttle colors can simply cancel each other out, be–
cause of uniform intensity; the desired quickening of perception disap–
pears in an uncomfortable sense of sourness and heat. But Matisse, even
at his wildest, never succumbs to this. (The same cannot be said of most
of his fellow Fauves, with the exception of Dufy at the very beginning;
Marquet, who is arguably not really a Fauve; and Braque, the late–
corneL) Matisse resists the temptation to go right around the spectrum.
He may concentrate on reds and greens, passing blues on the way, but
limit yellow to a small accent only, while patches of related hues - red,
orange, pink, and warm purple or blue, green, and greyed violet - are
made to read as large expanses by virtue ofproximity, instead of dissolv–
ing into incoherent spots. Even the most
apparently
pure hues turn out
to
be subtly modulated, a little
"0£[,"
unnameable.
Even in the "hottest" of his 1905 Fauvist pictures, Matisse instinc–
tively goes for the half-tones and the quarter-tones, like the marvelous
neutrals of later pictures, in order to make chromatic hues more potent.
The tender pinks, off-whites, and chalky, whitened viridian greens of the
sublime little painting
The Open Window
(1905, Mrs. John Hay
Whitney) are crucial to the sense of blazing beach light called up by the
picture, as crucial as glittering orange boats and the dance of cinnabar
red drawing. But what really nails the picture and most potently suggests
the sensation of looking out against bright light are the touches of dark
green and blue that stand for silhouetted window frame, vine, railings,
and deep shadow. In many ways, this is the key work of the period, not
only for its superbly orchestrated color and its radiant light, but for the
meaning of its composition. The artist presents us with a chunk of plea-
