Preference for the Primitive

THE NEW CRITERION, September 2025

Preference for the primitive

On the newly renovated Michael C. Rockefeller Wing at the Metropolitan Museum of Art.

What to make of the Metropolitan Museum of Art’s renovated Michael C. Rockefeller Wing, dedicated to the arts of Africa, Oceania, and ancient America? Astonishing, frightening, and baffling are three words that come to mind—and that’s more a reflection of the curatorial and architectural decisions that have been made here than of the tribal art on display.

Some 1,800 works from five different continents are newly jumbled together across 40,000 square feet in the rebooted galleries, which reopened on May 31 after a four-year closure and $70 million redo. New “diagonal trajector[ies]” have been “designed to foreground ancestral connections and Indigenous temporalities,” according to the Met’s opening announcement. “[N]ew perspectives on Indigenous concepts of the natural world as well as nuanced perceptions of gender roles” have been “newly framed by Indigenous perspectives.” Meanwhile, new cacophonies of “wall text and digital narratives placed throughout the galleries elevate Indigenous voices, foregrounding the latest developments in interdisciplinary scholarship.” Good luck just keeping track of what region a work is from or even what continent you think you are looking at. Devised by the appropriately named WHY Architecture, in collaboration with Beyer, Blinder, Belle and the Met’s design department, these galleries have been positioned to keep you guessing.

The cultural muddle, now arranged in a labyrinth of gleaming white walls and glass screens, is made all the more confusing in a blinding resplendence, illuminated by reglazed windows onto Central Park, that is visually appealing but programmatically suspect. Aztec, Asmat, Asante: sightlines bleed from one culture into the next. Under the curation of Alisa LaGamma (African art), Joanne Pillsbury (ancient Americas), and Maia Nuku (Oceania), what were once separate sections dedicated to distinct regions are now demarcated with barely a line on the floor.

Installation view of the Michael C. Rockefeller Wing at the Metropolitan Museum of Art. Photo: Bridgit Beyer.

This new open-plan design has been proposed to “suggest the unique spatial and relational dynamics of Oceania: horizon lines, the arching dome of the sky, and islands tethered in a vast ocean.” Elsewhere, it’s meant to take “inspiration from ancient American architectural traditions.” Along the ceiling, there are now “horizontal baffles that suggest ribbing to pay homage to one of Africa’s most celebrated structures: the Great Mosque of Jenne in Mali.” Such tossed-off, facile references are the window dressing of an Apple Store aesthetic selling Global South 2.0, with often brutal cultures that were oceans apart from one another—cultures that might as soon have killed, sacrificed, and devoured each other if they could.

With some exceptions, many of these works have been on display at the Met since this wing first opened in 1982. What’s different now are the hundreds of wall labels that surround them, justify them, and defend their continued display. Such justification is not for nothing. Across the park, at the American Museum of Natural History, entire galleries are being boarded up and turned into halls of shame. Generations of schoolchildren may wonder why the AMNH’s models of Eastern Woodland longhouses are suddenly treated as entartete Kunst. As the American Museum of Natural History “embraces new regulations,” reads one explanation plastered onto a hastily erected plywood screen, “these Halls displayed artifacts that may be objects of cultural significance, and the Museum does not have consent to display them.” If a museum can no longer display “objects of cultural significance,” one should wonder what remains beyond the gift shop.

Installation view of the Michael C. Rockefeller Wing at the Metropolitan Museum of Art. Photo: Bridgit Beyer.

Free of the baggage of consensual anthropology, the Metropolitan has faced the opposite conundrum: how to add ethnographic context to its otherwise disconnected displays, often collected merely for their aesthetic attributes (especially as they relate to modern Western art). The resulting pronouncements in the renovated wing make a number of contortions to please contemporary sensibilities, even promoting the violence informing the hall’s artistic expression. Just consider the wall label titled “Generating Vitality in the Asmat World”:

Unlike women who can support life within their own bodies, Asmat men wishing to capture nature’s generative capacities once did so through the act of headhunting. This practice—an important aspect of male ritual prestige before its prohibition in the twentieth century by Dutch colonial authorities—involved pursuing a rival and taking his life. Since the human head contains the most concentrated source of vitality, its capture (and the preservation of the skull in particular) catalyzed future cycles of growth and rebirth for humans, ancestors, and the natural world.

Like the sweetmeats of a carved-up head, there is much to extract from such a statement. In short, before the prohibition of cannibalism in New Guinea by colonial authorities and the arrival of Catholic missionaries, for peoples such as the Asmat, the depth of their creative expression was a direct testament to the ferocity of their bloodlust. Headhunting may indeed have been an “important aspect of male ritual prestige,” but one is left wondering if the victims of the Asmat regret the Dutch arrival in the East Indies. Try justifying anti-colonialism to a shrunken head.

The radical relativism of the ethno-aesthetics on display in the Met’s confounding galleries is the capstone to a long-range project, one that has less to do with prehistoric third-world cultures and more with the obsessions of modern Western taste. Beyond the story of the family of man, these particular galleries are ultimately about the family of Rockefeller.

“Primitive” is a word that has been so thoroughly expunged from any mention in this wing that its absence belies a lingering presence. That’s part of the untold story here, scrubbed from the countless wall labels and disclosures of “provenance”: there would be no Met wing dedicated to the arts of Africa, ancient America, and Oceania without the Rockefellers’ primitivist passions and the tragic intergenerational dynamics that came as a consequence of their zeal.

“The more you prefer the primitive,” wrote the art historian E. H. Gombrich, “the less you can become primitive.” In the modern world, simplicity, subjectivity, even crudity can appeal to sophisticated taste as elite culture looks for deeper truths beneath the polish of refinement. The Rockefellers have certainly taken this view to heart. Over successive generations, the family has shown a distinct preference for the primitive in their cultural philanthropy, from their support for American folk art to the primitivist turn of international modernism. Abby Aldrich Rockfeller, the wife of John D. Rockefeller Jr., helped establish both Colonial Williamsburg and New York’s Museum of Modern Art. In 1957, her son, Nelson Aldrich Rockefeller, founded the Museum of Primitive Art in a townhouse on the same block as MOMA as well as their former city residence. Headed up by the wide-ranging art historian Robert Goldwater, inspired by modernism’s primitivist influences and Paris’s Musée du Trocadéro, the Museum of Primitive Art as its name implied sought to elevate the traditional sculpture and textiles of Africa, the Americas, Asia, Europe, and Oceania from artifact to the level of high art.

Beginning in the 1960s, through the intermediation of René d’Harnoncourt, then the director of MOMA, Nelson Rockefeller began transferring these primitive works to the Metropolitan. He not only seeded a collection where none existed but also underwrote the construction of the wing to house it. Even today, some one-third of the works in the Met’s primitive collection passed through Rockefeller hands, including many of its most notable pieces, such as a Dogon blacksmith’s Priest with Raised Arms (1300s–1600s), the Eyema byeri (reliquary guardian figure) (1800s–early 1900s) of an Okak-Fang artist, and the Gwandansu figure (1400s–1600s) by a Bamana numuw (blacksmith). Since the term “primitive” has now become outmoded and even deeply regretted, the Met’s wall labels and provenancial literature identify all of these works as merely having passed through “MPA,” never once explaining that the acronym is short for Museum of Primitive Art.

This is but one of the many sleights of hand in the renovated Michael C. Rockefeller Wing—originally known as the Michael C. Rockefeller Memorial Wing. Far more significant is the disappearance (then and now) of Michael Clark Rockefeller, Nelson’s son, for whom the wing is named. A “memorial” would suggest a death, but the Met has whitewashed the tragedy of his involvement in these galleries, now merely stating that he was

greatly inspired by the cultures and art of the Pacific and pursued new avenues of inquiry into artistic practice during his travels there. Among the wing’s signature works are the striking Asmat sculptures he researched and collected in southwest New Guinea.

What gets left unsaid is that Michael, a year out of college, disappeared while collecting those very sculptures—trading sachets of tobacco for totemic bis poles, adorned with references to shrunken heads, that now dominate the wing named in his honor. As an added tragedy, Michael may have become the victim of the same cannibalistic culture he was intent on discovering and collecting. Departing from the official Harvard-Peabody Expedition that first brought him to study the Ndani people in the Baliem Valley in the Central Highlands of Western New Guinea in early 1961, he pursued the works of the Asmat in a two-man mission, floating along the coast of New Guinea aboard a catamaran jury-rigged from two canoes. On November 18 of that year, his catamaran capsized in the swift crosscurrents of the mouth of the Eilanden, or Betsj, River. He gathered together a knife and compass and tethered up the boat’s gas tanks as a personal flotation device, determined to make for shore. He was last seen swimming away by his crewmate, the Dutch anthropologist René Wassing, who held onto the wreckage and was recovered the following day, along with Michael’s journals.

Michael C. Rockefeller with Papuan natives in New Guinea, 1961.

Published six years later, the journals speak of Michael’s harrowing infatuation with these cannibals. Facing the specter of his parents’ impending divorce, wishing to please his father, then the governor of New York, by contributing to his Museum of Primitive Art, Michael pursued the Asmat at his own peril. As he wrote in his journal:

What we saw were some imposing remnants of a marvelous past. I suppose not so marvelous from a Christian point of view, for the Asmats were a ferocious headhunting people constantly engaged in inter-village war and raids of varying degrees of deadliness. However, the sculpture that has been and (in some areas) is being produced by Asmat artists is unquestionably some of the greatest to come from a primitive culture . . . .

And equally as remarkable as the art is the fact that the culture which produces it is still intact; some remote areas are still headhunting; and only five years ago almost the whole area was headhunting.

Afinal Rockefeller in this tragedy is Mary Rockefeller Morgan, Michael’s fraternal twin sister. Now eighty-seven years old, she has been a vocal donor to the renovation. Her brother is now absent from the public side of the wing that bears his name—and most likely that’s the point. With new sightlines that connect Nelson’s Priest with Raised Arms with Michael’s bis poles beyond, this wing feels like a private family shrine as never before. While publicly drawing us into its purely expressive wonders, this primitive collection has a private side that tells a very different story.

Moonraker

THE NEW CRITERION, April 2025

Moonraker

On “Caspar David Friedrich: The Soul of Nature,” at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York.

For those of us who prefer our art soft-baked, Caspar David Friedrich (1774–1840) can seem irredeemably hard-boiled. This painter of crucified peaks and mystified valleys, of gnarled trees and ruined churches, all underlit in a raking gloam, looked out to the infinite and wanted to perceive even more.

Pairing pictorial ambition with technical restraint, Friedrich filled his canvases with an emptiness that made him the paragon of German Romanticism—and the bane of critics from his time to our own. “It is true presumption,” wrote his contemporary Friedrich von Ramdohr, “when landscape painting wants to slink into the church and creep up on the altars.” Nearly two centuries on, Hilton Kramer called the artist a “second-rate talent” whose claim to first-rate status is nothing less than a “libel on the art of the great Romantic painters.”

Supersized, vacuous, and unabashedly over-the-top, Friedrich’s paintings no doubt planted the seeds for an invasive spiritualism in art. Turning to the “unknowable hereafter,” he proclaimed, he aimed for that “darkness of the future! Which is only ever sacred intuition, to be seen and recognized only in belief.” From German nationalism to National Socialism to radical environmentalism, his compositions became the ready vessels for a brimful of bad ideas. At the least, it is safe to say, a little bit of Friedrich goes a very long way.

For this reason, in the United States, Friedrich up until now has been the beneficiary of his own limited exposure. The first Friedrich oil to enter an American museum came only in 1984, when the Kimbell Art Museum in Fort Worth acquired the diminutive Mountain Peak with Drifting Clouds (ca. 1835). Since then, fewer than a half dozen other U.S. institutions have acquired works by the artist, whose paintings are largely concentrated in German collections.

Caspar David Friedrich, Self-Portrait, 1800, Black chalk on wove paper, Statens Museum for Kunst, Copenhagen.

At the same time, loan exhibitions of his major oils, mostly held in the Alte Nationalgalerie of the Staatliche Museen zu Berlin, the Staatliche Kunstsammlungen Dresden, and the Hamburger Kunsthalle, have been notably circumscribed. The first large stateside Friedrich exhibition took place in 1990 with “The Romantic Vision of Caspar David Friedrich: Paintings and Drawings from the U.S.S.R.” In 2001, after its acquisition of Two Men Contemplating the Moon (ca. 1825–30), the Metropolitan organized what was only the second Friedrich show in America, with just seven of his paintings and two drawings.

So “Caspar David Friedrich: The Soul of Nature,” the exhibition with over seventy-five of his works now on view at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, tied to the 250th anniversary of his birth and a blockbuster year of shows in Germany, is not only a major event.1 Drawing from the three significant holdings of Friedrich’s art in Germany and over thirty other lenders, it is also the first true retrospective of his work in the United States. But is this all too much Friedrich for his (and our) own good?

Organized by Alison Hokanson, a curator in the Metropolitan’s Department of European Paintings, and Joanna Sheers Seidenstein, an assistant curator in the Department of Drawings and Prints, “The Soul of Nature” makes every effort to bring Romanticism’s high striver back down to sea level. A winding path through a selection of mostly smaller works, arranged in the Met’s most compressed special-exhibition hall, here painted in muted tones, forces us into close proximity with Friedrich’s art while metering out his greatest hits. As a few cut-out walls offer glimpses of the larger paintings that follow, the slow approach keeps the presentation gratefully scaled down and anti-monumental.

No doubt informed by Seidenstein’s specialization in works on paper, the exhibition also begins and ends with Friedrich’s drawings and prints. This intelligent framing encourages us to focus on Friedrich as draftsman first and ideas-man second. The approach rightly illuminates the formal innovations that Friedrich brought to his canvases after first working them out on paper. There can be no argument that Friedrich was an astonishing illustrator. His drawings remain among his most accomplished works and certainly his most compelling. As presented here, the virtuosity that Friedrich displayed on paper might just be his greatest achievement.

Caspar David Friedrich, View of Arkona with Rising Moon, 1805–06, Brown ink & wash over pencil on paper, Albertina Museum, Vienna.

We can already see these accomplishments in his self-portrait of 1800 (Statens Museum for Kunst, Copenhagen)—an assured, penetrating work of black chalk on wove paper. Selections of his plant and tree studies from June 1799, on loan from the Kupferstichkabinett, Staatliche Museen zu Berlin, reveal an artist using pencil, ink, and particularly wash to render an assembly of leaves to remarkable visual effect. Testing out his washes on the edges of the paper, Friedrich could already deploy layers of shading to create a deep dimensionality.

These exacting studies and close observations led to his first major breakthrough: View of Arkona with Rising Moon (1805–6, Albertina Museum, Vienna). This large work on paper, two feet high and over three feet wide, one of a series of iterations of the composition, employs several pictorial strategies that Friedrich revisited throughout his career. Drawing upon his studies of the island of Rügen in 1801, looking north and east from Vitt Beach towards Cape Arkona and the Baltic Sea, Friedrich lights his scene as though from behind the frame. A rising moon on the horizon fluoresces the ocean mist and rippling waves. At the same time, an imposing foreground of rocks, hulls, masts, fences, and walls—partially obscuring our more distant view and nearly rendered in silhouette—is seemingly cast into an ever greater obscurity.

With our footing uncertain, Friedrich pulls us into the feeling of the image, deliberately making our perspective unstable. He knows how raking light can dazzle and disorient more than it reveals, with the glowing horizon merely blinding us to the nearby shadows. Like most observers, my first response to this image of studied obscurantism, of tiny details and near illegibility, was to blink.

View of Arkona with Rising Moon was a sensation when first exhibited in Dresden in 1806. In 1822, it entered the possession of Prince Albert Casimir of Saxony, through which it formed part of the founding collection of the Albertina. The work’s greatest mystery is the question of just how an artist could have created an image of such precision. One answer was the traditional education in draftsmanship that Friedrich received in Greifswald and Copenhagen. The other was the adoption of new media—for example, sepia wash used on smooth wove paper as opposed to bister (from burned wood) on textured laid paper—that had been introduced to Dresden by the academician Jakob Crescentius Seydelmann.

Caspar David Friedrich, Wanderer above the Sea of Fog, ca. 1817, Oil on canvas, Hamburger Kunsthalle.

In her catalogue essay, Seidenstein expands on the importance of sepia wash to Friedrich’s developing tonalities. The pigment was only recently developed into a shelf-stable medium in Italy (sepia from seppia, the Italian word for cuttlefish, from which the ink is derived). Applied in layers of slow-drying glazes, sepia gave Friedrich a means of nuanced illumination that at the same time concealed the hand of the artist almost entirely from view.

In his studied and detailed unfolding of landscape—placing the viewer in an uncertain foreground, obscuring the background, and effacing the reference points of middle ground—Friedrich locates us in places where we would never otherwise go and that he would not necessarily visit himself. Most of his finished landscapes in fact were confections. He painted the peaks of the Watzmann, as in the assured canvas of 1824–25 from the Alte Nationalgalerie, Staatliche Museen zu Berlin, but he never traveled south to see the actual alpine summit.

Friedrich was not shy in using animistic anthropomorphism and religious imagery together for their sentimental effects. Nor did he refrain from squeezing every moonrise and sunset of their last lumen. As developed by the philosopher Friedrich Wilhelm Joseph Schelling, Friedrich’s sense for Naturphilosophie, for a “world soul,” turned every tree into a figure and every branch into a grasping hand. His interest in landscape was also nationalistic. Often depicting himself in traditional (and for a time illicit) German garb, he aimed to capture “our German sun, moon, and stars, our rocks, trees, and vegetation, our plains, seas, and rivers.” Surveying their abundance at the Metropolitan, as Friedrich turned from drawing to painting after 1807, I would have been fine if some of these suns, moons, and stars had remained in Germany. The same goes for Friedrich’s series of hilltop crucifixes, all illuminated in a sunset glow, to which we can only ascribe another German notion, that of pure kitsch.

There are nevertheless several highlights here, some of them on view in the United States for the first time. Monk by the Sea (1808–10, Alte Nationalgalerie, Staatliche Museen zu Berlin) is one such example. A small, solitary figure looks out at the empty, wine-dark sea. The open, unmoored atmosphere of this large work is its most notable feature, ever more so after studies of its underpainting reveal that Friedrich removed several ships from view, untying us from any anchoring in its middle ground. It is just a shame that the condition of this work is now marred by several brown streaks down its surface, perhaps due to the discoloration of Friedrich’s use of smalt—a semi-transparent blue pigment made from crushed glass that extended to canvas those nuanced glazing practices he first developed in sepia, but one that is notoriously unstable.

Caspar David Friedrich, Cave in the Harz, ca. 1837, Brown ink & wash with pencil on paper, The Royal Danish Collection, Copenhagen.

Other attractions here are works that stand apart in subject matter from the rest, in particular the domestic Woman at the Window (1822, Alte Nationalgalerie, Staatliche Museen zu Berlin). A selection of works by Johan Christian Dahl, Carl Gustav Carus, and August Heinrich—all contemporary to Friedrich and drawn mostly from the Met’s collection—helps to place the subject’s pictorial achievements in his time. So too does Caspar David Friedrich in His Studio (1811, Hamburger Kunsthalle), a portrait by Georg Friedrich Kersting that shows the supreme draftsman balancing his hand on a mahl stick next to his triangles and T-squares. It is regrettable that Friedrich’s magisterial Sea of Ice of 1823–24 has not traveled here from Hamburger Kunsthalle, but the tiny Rocky Reef off the Seacoast (ca. 1824, Staatliche Kunsthalle Karlsruhe) conveys some of that same Fortress of Solitude crystallization.

The big get of this exhibition is without a doubt Wanderer above the Sea of Fog (ca. 1817), here on loan for the first time from Hamburger Kunsthalle. This work, now an icon of Western painting, illustrates the cover of the exhibition catalogue, not to mention dorm-room posters the world over. The image of a solitary windswept climber, surmounting a craggy peak and surveying the misty mountains below, deploys all of Friedrich’s tropes, in particular that of the Rückenfigur, or back figure, depicted in a vertiginous silhouette. Like many ubiquitous images, the painting is smaller in person than you might expect. The foreground and background also interact in more subtle ways than you can observe in reproduction, with the symmetry of fog and ridgeline coming together at the center of the floating figure like two wings.

Friedrich’s reputation waned shortly after he painted this image, as taste for his speculative school of landscape, based in Dresden, moved on to the more clinical eye of the Düsseldorf Academy. As his health deteriorated, he turned again to paper and the precise sepia washes that first made his career. In its inchoate abstraction, tempered only by tiny tufts of grass, Cave in the Harz (ca. 1837) is a gravitational tour de force. The same must be said of Dolmen near Gützkow (ca. 1837), also from the Royal Danish Collection. In this neolithic burial site, of boulders pressing on stone, Friedrich envisions a prehistoric cemetery. The desolate hilltop also anticipates the death, just three years later, of this most modern of German artists.

1. “Caspar David Friedrich: The Soul of Nature” opened at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, on February 8 and remains on view through May 11, 2025. 

A Study in Contrasts

THE NEW CRITERION, December 2023

A study in contrasts

On “Vertigo of Color: Matisse, Derain, and the Origins of Fauvism” at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York.

I beg the reader never to forget when it is asserted of the phenomena of simultaneous contrast, that one color placed beside another receives such a modification from it that this manner of speaking does not mean that the two colors, or rather the two material objects that present them to us, have a mutual action, either physical or chemical; it is really only applied to the modification that takes place before us when we perceive the simultaneous impression of these two colors.
—Michel Eugène Chevreul, The Principles of Harmony and Contrast of Colors (1839, translated by Charles Martel in 1854)

The accentuation of color has been one of modern art’s defining preoccuptations. Now, as we process life through illuminated screens, we might even say that amplified color has become a feature of modernity itself. The secret behind modern color’s dazzling power is contrast. From the pointillist painters to our pixelated monitors, complementary hues in close proximity can take a shimmering hold of the senses. Modern painters were among the first to explore these pyrotechnics by drawing on the innovations of nineteenth-century color theory.

Michel Eugène Chevreul (1786–1889) was one such theorist who had a profound effect on art history. A groundbreaking chemist with a remarkable life and range of accomplishments, Chevreul did not set out to change the course of art when he wrote De la loi du contraste simultané des couleurs et de l’assortiment des objets colorés. Yet through his book on the effect of contrasting colors, which he published in 1839 and which was translated into English in 1854, Chevreul was among those who planted the seeds for what became the lush garden of modern art.

Michele Eugène Chevreul, nineteenth century. Photo: Unknown.

Born just before the French Revolution, Chevreul lived over a hundred years to see the construction of the Eiffel Tower, on which his name was inscribed along with seventy-one other scientists in France’s modern pantheon. The honor was well deserved: Chevreul’s research on animal and vegetable fats led to innovations in candle- and soap-making; he was the first to identify the excess glucose excreted by diabetics and the first to discover and isolate creatine in muscle; and through his studies of natural compounds, he became a founding father of organic chemistry.

But it was an inadvertent discovery beyond the chemistry lab that influenced the future of art. In 1824, Chevreul became the director of the dye works at the Gobelins manufactory, the storied textile operation established in Paris in 1662 to supply tapestry for the royal court. An issue at the time of Chevreul’s arrival was the quality of its black thread, which was seen to shade into red under certain circumstances. By observing the black in isolation, Chevreul discerned that the effect was not a problem with the chemistry of the dye but rather with the proximity of the thread to other colors, in particular to blue. In other words, the effect was a matter of perception caused by optical interaction. In his subsequent book on this “harmony and contrast of colors,” which began as lectures at Gobelins, Chevreul expanded this research to reveal how certain hues appear dull when placed together, while others, in particular complementary colors from opposite ends of his color wheel, produce a sense of visual stimulation that exceeds the effects of the colors in isolation.

Through his study of contrasts, Chevreul found that while the mixing of complementary pigments would dull their effects, their juxtaposition in close proximity appeared to intensify their natures. By making a science of such contrasts, Chevreul suggested that the brightest colors were best mixed not on the canvas but in the palette of the mind, through what he called a “simultaneous impression.” He wondered, “What happens when two adjacent hues are complementary, like green and red?” Through an unexpected optical effect, “by the law of contrast, the two colors, being complementary, mutually strengthen each other; the green renders the red redder, and the red renders the green greener.”

Michele Eugène Chevreul’s color wheel

By considering the effects of color combinations on the observer, Chevreul’s study helped shift the focus of perception from representation to sensation. In his Principles of Color of 1969, Faber Birren called Chevreul one of the greatest names in the history of color. This was particularly true with respect to Chevreul’s influence on the Impressionists and Neo-Impressionists: “The pointillist style of painting, in which small dots or swirls of color are used to effect visual mixtures, was more or less founded in theory by Chevreul.” Camille Pissarro likewise reported that Georges Seurat sought the “modern synthesis with scientifically based means which will be founded on the theory of colors discovered by M. Chevreul.” As Birren concluded:

The painting schools of Impressionism and Neo-Impressionism were devoted almost entirely to the combination of pure color, tint, white. . . . Previously, most artists had employed ochers, browns, somber shades of green, maroon, blue. The Impressionists and Neo-Impressionists glorified the phenomena of light and used spots of color in an attempt to achieve luminous visual mixtures.

By the beginning of the twentieth century, the Neo-Impressionists had turned art into their own modern science, with set prescriptions of how they believed they could deploy contrasting pigments to maximum effect. Understanding the role of light in exposing such contrasts, many of these artists gravitated south, to work under the more direct summer sun. Here in the intense illumination of the Mediterranean, they found the light to explore and develop their ideas of color.

For Henri Matisse (1869–1954) and André Derain (1880–1954), a single such summer spent painting together in 1905, in the Mediterranean fishing village of Collioure, led to what we now know as Fauvism, the “beastly” next chapter of modern art’s exploration of color. “Vertigo of Color: Matisse, Derain, and the Origins of Fauvism,” an exhibition at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, now gathers their paintings, studies, and correspondence from this remarkable stay.1

Of the two artists, Matisse was the older and more established. He had spent the previous summer of 1904 with Paul Signac and other Neo-Impressionists in Saint-Tropez. Luxe, Calme et Volupté, Matisse’s groundbreaking painting from that sojourn, now in the collection of the Musée d’Orsay, reflected Signac’s Divisionist principles of contrasting color while also revealing Matisse’s expressive style; “Vertigo of Color” includes a study for this work on loan from the Museum of Modern Art. As Matisse looked to continue these explorations, it was Signac, an accomplished mariner who first sailed to Collioure in 1887, who brought the remote village to the attention of Matisse and his family. “Contrasts and color relationships, here lies the secret to drawing and form,” Signac wrote as encouragement to Matisse, quoting Paul Cézanne.

Henri Matisse, Luxe, Calme et Volupté, 1904, Oil on canvas, Musée d’Orsay, Paris.

For all that he owed to Signac, Matisse was ready to move beyond the color precepts of Neo-Impressionism, or what he called the “tyranny of Divisionism. One can’t live in a household that is too well kept, a house kept by country aunts.” In Collioure, a Catalan fishing village fifteen miles north of the Spanish border, he found the isolation necessary to push his palette and paint application in new ways. Years later, he remarked how “color for me is a force. My paintings consist of four or five colors which clash with one another expressively. When I apply green, that does not mean grass. When I apply blue, that does not mean sky. It is their accord or their opposition which opens in the viewer’s mind an illusory space.”

In this isolated stretch of France’s Vermilion Coast, which had only been accessible by sea before the tunneling of the railroad, Matisse did not end up working alone. In mid-June he received a letter from André Derain, an ambitious young painter over ten years his junior: “You know that I am quite alone in my ideas, which is very painful now. . . . Send me a postcard in which you beg me to join you instantly, recommending that I do this for my work.” Matisse did just that: “I cannot insist too strongly that a stay here is absolutely necessary for your work.” Three days later, on June 28, Derain wrote back: “I’ll soon be with you. I think this will make you as happy as it does me. I’m really glad, for a terrible bout of neurasthenia was beginning to shut me down.”

As assembled by Dita Amory, the Robert Lehman Curator in Charge of the Met’s Robert Lehman Collection, and Ann Dumas, Consulting Curator of European Art at the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, “Vertigo of Color” brings together for the first time sixty-five of the paintings, drawings, and watercolors these two artists created while together in Collioure and the surrounding countryside —many of which have rarely before been on public view. “That legendary partnership, organized quite by chance, would forever change the course of French painting,” write the curators in the exhibition catalogue:

their daring color experiments ultimately challenged reliance on empirical evidence; their brushwork abandoned Neo-Impressionism’s strict adherence to formulaic divisionism; and their art evolved from sensory experience and from a raw and passionate dialogue in search of a new beginning.

In Collioure, Matisse made fifteen paintings, forty watercolors, and nearly a hundred drawings as preparation for larger work back in his studio. Derain, determined meanwhile to return to Paris with as many canvases as he could carry, composed thirty paintings on site that summer, along with twenty drawings and some fifty sketches. It is the concentration of this work assembled here that makes the exhibition so revealing. Arranged in the lower level of the Metropolitan’s Lehman wing, the show intermixes paintings and studies by the two artists in a looping progression that suggests their own sense of discovery, all while lending itself to the “vertigo” of color promised by the exhibition title.

André Derain, Fishing Boats, Collioure, 1905, Oil on canvas, Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York. Gift of Raymond Paul, in memory of her brother, C. Michael Paul and Purchase, Lila Acheson Wallace Gift, New York. © 2023 Artists Rights Society, New York / ADAGP Paris.

Both artists deployed dashes of bold, contrasting colors in their works, often leaving exposed light ground, but their palettes differed. Derain’s flaky surfaces of orange and blue appear baked in the Collioure sun. Matisse’s color choices—of lavender, peach, and green—are more sea-cooled. Matisse also comes off more at ease, as a painter willing to forego the illusion of depth for an intuitive sense of surface, while Derain holds onto the architecture of space, hammering away with his nails of color and light. Derain’s Fishing Boats, Collioure, from the Metropolitan’s collection, is a dense mosaic of orange, green, and blue. Meanwhile, Matisse’s Pier of Collioure, on loan from a private collection, is a windswept assembly of purple, pink, and teal.

André Derain, Henri Matisse, 1905, Oil on canvas, Tate, London. © 2023 Artists Rights Society, New York / ADAGP, Paris. Photo: Tate.

The portraits the artists painted of each other that summer, both on loan from the Tate, display their different color sensibilities while revealing the personalities of the other. Derain finds Matisse bearded and bespectacled, smoking from a pipe, his focused face rendered in orange and blue with a shadow cast in dense green. Matisse, meanwhile, captures Derain looking away, his thoughts elsewhere, in a loose application of light reds, greens, and blues.

André Derain, Woman with a Shawl, Madame Matisse in a Kimono, 1905, Oil on canvas, Private Collection, Courtesy of Nevill Keating Pictures, London. © 2023 Artists Rights Society, New York / ADAGP, Paris.

In addition to the port of Collioure, another subject the artists shared was Amélie Matisse. With her blue-and-white kimono, the painter’s wife sat for both artists, while also serving privately as a nude model for her husband. With its green background and red shadows, Derain’s Woman with a Shawl, Madame Matisse in a Kimono, from a private collection, is one of his most assured paintings in the exhibition. A year later, Matisse turned to the same composition himself, rendering Madame Matisse with Her Fan in pen and ink, in a work on loan from the Art Institute of Chicago. In Matisse and His Wife at Collioure, an ink on paper from the collection of the Met, Derain captured Henri painting a portrait of Amélie with an easel balanced on the rocky shoreline. The very portrait Matisse was composing that day, a study of colorful dashes and squiggles called La Japonaise: Woman Beside the Water, is also in this exhibition, on loan from the Museum of Modern Art.

Henri Matisse, La Japonaise: Woman beside the Water, 1905, Oil and graphite on canvas, Museum of Modern Art, New York. © 2023 Artists Rights Society, New York / ADAGP, Paris.

At Collioure, each artist took color in its own direction. For Derain, “Colors became sticks of dynamite. They were primed to discharge light.” In a July 28 letter to Maurice de Vlaminck, his studio-mate back home, Derain wrote that “this color has messed me up. I’ve let myself go with color for color’s sake. I’ve lost all my old qualities.” Matisse, meanwhile, settled into ever greater assurance as a colorist. As he remarked years later:

I applied my color, it was the first color of my canvas. I added a second color, and then, instead of making a correction, when this second color did not seem to accord with the first, I applied a third to create such an accord. Then, I had to continue in this way until I sensed that I had created a complete harmony on my canvas, and that I had discharged the emotion which had made me undertake it.

We can see this complete harmony in Open Window, Collioure, a painting on loan from the National Gallery of Art and a supreme example of simultaneous contrast. Looking onto the boats in port from an open window, Matisse unites inside and out, the refraction of sun and shadows, not through the distinction of light and dark but through the interaction of purple, green, and pink. Taken together, the colors unify the surface of the picture while also capturing the sensation of blinding light through an overwhelming sense of color. Here in his intuitive application of contrast, Matisse most successfully departs from his Neo-Impressionist influences—reflecting what the critic Louis Vauxcelles (who coined the term Fauvism) had advised him earlier that year: “Your gifts are too magnificent, mixing and balancing intuitive sensations and will, for you to lose yourself in experiments that are sincere but that go against your true nature.”

Henri Matisse, Open Windown, Coullioure, 1905, Oil on canvas, National Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C., Collection of Mrs. John Hay Whitney. © 2023 Artists Rights Society, New York / ADAGP, Paris.

Both artists returned from Collioure just in time to cause a sensation with their work at the 1905 Salon d’Automne, an exhibition that cemented both of their careers. Matisse knew he had achieved something important that summer. As he wrote to Signac in September, “It was the first time in my life that I was content to be exhibiting, for my things are perhaps not very important, but they have the merit of expressing in a very pure way my sensations. Something I’ve been working toward since I began to paint.” When Leo Stein saw Woman with a Hat, now in the collection of the San Francisco Museum of Art and not included in the current exhibition, he remarked it was a “thing brilliant and powerful, but the nastiest smear of paint I had ever seen.” The work served to introduce Matisse to Leo and Gertrude Stein, their brother Michael, and his wife Sarah. The Steins in turn introduced Matisse to the Cone sisters, the Baltimore collectors who soon bought several of his works and became lifelong patrons.

Despite his own lingering doubts, Derain experienced an equally impressive reception in Paris. The dealer Ambroise Vollard took up his cause and sold paintings from Collioure to the Russian collectors Sergei Shchukin and Ivan Morozov. Vollard also commissioned Derain to paint fifty views of London, hoping to repeat the success of Claude Monet’s impressions of the Thames from a decade before. Derain was so critical of the London weather that he finished the works in his French studio. Nevertheless, by the summer of 1907, Vollard had purchased thirty of these compositions. Derain’s Palace of Westminster (1906–07), from the Met’s own collection, is included here along with Matisse’s Young Sailor ii (1906) and View of Collioure (1907), from the artist’s return to the village. These final works reveal the direction of both artists, and in particular Matisse, as they freed themselves to explore color without precondition—as Matisse said, “to reach that state of condensation of sensations which constitutes a picture.” All are a product of that summer of 1905. The collaboration of these two artists resulted in a simultaneous contrast that continues to shimmer.

1.   “Vertigo of Color: Matisse, Derain, and the Origins of Fauvism” opened at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, on October 13, 2023, and remains on view through January 21, 2024. The exhibition will next be seen at the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston (February 25–May 27, 2024).