Giorgione in the House

THE NEW CRITERION, February 2024

Giorgione in the house

On “Bellini and Giorgione in the House of Taddeo Contarini” at Frick Madison, New York.

The arrival of a single painting in the United States is not often cause for a special exhibition. When the visitor, however, is a work by Giorgio Barbarelli da Castelfranco, better known as Giorgione (ca. 1477–1510), you make an exception. Only about ten paintings are attributed today to the enigmatic Venetian, and The Three Philosophers (ca. 1508–09), now on loan in New York for the first time from the Kunsthistorisches Museum, Vienna, is among his greatest achievements. So the appearance of this canvas at the Frick Collection’s temporary home of Frick Madison is cause for a very special exhibition indeed. That this painting has been reunited—for the first time in some four hundred years—with its pendant composition, Giovanni Bellini’s St. Francis in the Desert (ca. 1475–80), the masterpiece from the Frick’s own collection that in the sixteenth century occupied the same Venetian palazzo as the Giorgione, is also cause for jubilation. This reunion is the occasion for a revelatory one-room show, “Bellini and Giorgione in the House of Taddeo Contarini.”1

The loan is the result of a pursuit that bordered on obsession for Xavier F. Salomon, the Frick’s Deputy Director and Peter Jay Sharp Chief Curator. The exhibition is also a tribute to the Frick’s outgoing director, Ian Wardropper, who has set his retirement for next year, and his high-minded use of the collection’s temporary digs on Madison Avenue—the former home of the Whitney Museum, onetime outpost of the Metropolitan Museum, and future headquarters of Sotheby’s auction house. On March 3, the Frick will vacate these galleries that have functioned like private viewing rooms for its collection and move back to its mansion at One East Seventieth Street.

Installation view of “Bellini and Giorgione in the House of Taddeo Contarini.” Photo: Joseph Coscia Jr.

The installation of the Frick’s permanent collection on Madison Avenue—and in particular the presentation of St. Francis—was the inspiration for Salomon’s dream of reuniting the Bellini with the Giorgione. To underscore the worthiness of the unprecedented loan, in the accompanying catalogue published by D Giles Limited, Salomon collects everything we could possibly imagine about the creation, meaning, and provenance of The Three Philosophers and its relationship with St. Francis in the Desert.

Three years ago, I wrote about the effect of seeing St. Francis in the Desert in the light of Frick Madison (see “Sublet with Bellini” in The New Criterion of April 2021). A raking illumination fills the scene from beyond the left frame—unseen by us, but fully apparent to Francis, who exposes the symbolic wounds of the stigmata on his hands and feet. Flora and fauna fill this vision of his rocky hermitage as the rays seemingly melt its icelike outcropping into a stream, watering a kingfisher below. Kenneth Clark noted how “no other great painting, perhaps, contains such a quantity of natural details observed and rendered with incredible patience: for no other painter has been able to give to such an accumulation the unity which is only achieved by love.”

Giorgione, The Three Philosophers, ca. 1508–09, Oil on canvas, Kunsthistorisches Museum, Vienna. Photo: KMH-Museumsverband.

At Frick Madison, positioned in its own alcove, the painting has been lit by one of Marcel Breuer’s trapezoidal windows in a way that accentuates the work’s own luminous dynamics. Light and shadow, depiction and reality glow together. The Three Philosophers has now been hung on this alcove’s opposite wall, which had been left empty before the arrival of the Giorgione. Again we are presented with figures in a rocky landscape, this time three men in colorful robes, with two standing and one seated. The similarities in these compositions of roughly equal size are striking, especially as the two paintings can now be observed together. The hills in the distance share uncanny form, as do the designs of the distant towns with their arched construction. The stepped stones in the foregrounds seem like mirror formations. Even the tiny pebbles appear to have been quarried from the same source.

The two paintings interact the more you move around them and take them in. Are we looking at the same scene depicting two different periods of time? Or are these two sides of the same outcropping, with the stone floor of Frick Madison now running between them? While the direct lighting of St. Francis leaves little doubt of its divine origin, the illumination of the Giorgione is more elusive. A sun low on the horizon seems to be setting, but the figures appear to be lit with an unexplained glow. Those “three philosophers” may be seen carrying scientific instruments and tablets relating to the sun and moon, but the lighting of the composition is non-Euclidian and otherworldly. It is almost as if the radiance of the Bellini is now bouncing off of the Giorgione in mystical, lunar-like reflection.

Giovanni Bellini, St. Francis in the Desert, ca. 1475–80, Oil on panel, Frick Collection, New York. Photo: Michael Bodycomb.

As is often the case with Giorgione, the more we look into this young painter’s work, the less we understand it. Anyone who has tracked down Giorgione’s small painting The Tempest (ca. 1508) in Venice’s Gallerie dell’Accademia can likewise attest to the mystery of that strange and tender scene of a nursing mother, an idle man, and ruined architecture beneath a stormy sky. Who are they? Where are we? What are we seeing? The questions strike like a thunderclap emanating from the clouds above. Here is something more than just visual storytelling with known characters and stock symbols. Rather it is something absorptive, mysterious, and new.

The same goes for The Three Philosophers. The composition has warmed observers with its brilliance but also baffled scholars about its meaning since just about the time of its own creation. In 1525 a Venetian collector by the name of Marcantonio Michiel (1484–1552) was making a survey of art in the Veneto when he recorded a definitive account of these paintings together in what he titled his Pittori e pitture in diversi luoghi (Painters and paintings in different places). This manuscript was later published as his Notizia d’opere di disegno (Information on works of design).

In his account of the paintings “in the house of Messer Taddeo Contarini,” written in the Venetian dialect, Michiel lists ten works. One of them is “three philosophers,” he writes, a “canvas in oil of the three philosophers in the landscape, two standing and one seated who is contemplating the sun’s rays, with that stone finished so marvelously . . . begun by Giorgio from Castelfranco and finished by Sebastiano Veneziano.” Another is a “Panel of St. Francis in the Desert,” which Marcantonio Michiel identifies as an oil by “Zuan Bellini, begun by him for Messer Zuan Michiel, and it has a landscape nearby wonderfully finished and refined.”

Installation view of “Bellini and Giorgione in the House of Taddeo Contarini.” Photo: Joseph Coscia Jr.

Marcantonio Michiel’s account is significant for several reasons: for coining the titles of the two works (3 phylosophi and S. Francesco nel diserto); for its clear descriptions of the paintings (dui ritti et uno sentado che contempla gli raggii solari cum quel saxo finto cusi mirabilmente and un paese propinquo finito et ricercato mirabilmente); for information about their authorship and provenance (Fu cominciata da Zorzo da Castel Franco, et finita da Sebastiano Venitiano and Fu opera de Zuan bellino, cominciata da lui a Ms. Zuan michiel); and for describing them together in one private collection (In casa de Ms. Tadio Contarino).

Recorded some forty-five years after the creation of St. Francis, seventeen years after Three Philosophers, fifteen years after Giorgione’s death, and nine years after the death of Giovanni Bellini (ca. 1424/35–1516), Michiel’s survey is also revelatory for what it leaves out: the identity of those three philosophers, as well as the particular moment depicted in Saint Francis of Assisi’s life. Both have been sources of discussion and conjecture ever since. For St. Francis, most scholars now agree that the image depicts the saint’s stigmatization, not in the “desert” but rather at his Apennine retreat at La Verna. Still, two standard references are missing: the seraph delivering Christ’s wounds, and Brother Leo. An alternative interpretation is that we are rather presented with Francis composing his Canticle of the Creatures, that prayer to “Brother Sun, Sister Moon, Brother Wind, Sister Water, Brother Fire, Sister Mother Earth, and Sister Bodily Death.”

The Giorgione poses an even greater conundrum. “Apart from Giorgione’s Tempest,” writes Salomon in his exhibition catalogue, “very few Venetian Renaissance works have received as much attention and been as widely interpreted as The Three Philosophers.” The identification of those “three philosophers,” which was left unstated by Marcantonio Michiel even within two decades of its execution, has resulted in centuries of conjecture. Assuming the painting in fact depicts “three philosophers” from antiquity, the proposed combinations as collected by Salomon have included the following: Archimedes, Ptolemy, and Pythagoras; Aristotle, Averroes, and Virgil; Regiomontanus, Aristotle, and Ptolemy; Ptolemy, Al-Battani, and Copernicus; Aristotle, Averroes, and a humanist; and Plato, Aristotle, and Pythagoras. Alternatively, the figures might represent the Three Magi; or Marcus Aurelius studying with two philosophers on the Caelian Hill; or Abraham teaching astronomy to the Egyptians; or Evander and Pallas showing Aeneas the Capitoline Hill; or a meeting between Sultan Mehmet II and Patriarch Gennadios Scholarios in Constantinople; or Saint Luke, King David, and Saint Jerome; or King Solomon, King Hiram of Tyre, and the master craftsman Hiram of Tyre as they plan the Temple in Jerusalem; or perhaps even the painters Giovanni Bellini, Vittore Carpaccio, and Giorgione. For Xavier Salomon, the most convincing identification, as proposed by the scholar Karin Zeleny, is that of Pythagoras with his two teachers, Thales of Miletus and Pherecydes of Syros, “the first three philosophers of the Western tradition shown while at the Oracle of Apollo at Didyma.” I am more partial to the poetic approach proposed by the art historian Tom Nichols in his book Giorgione’s Ambiguity, in which he suggests that our interpretation is meant to remain free-floating and open-ended. Deliberate ambiguities, he writes, are Giorgione’s “visual traps set to capture the viewer’s curiosity and speculation.”

“Uncertain about authorship, patronage, dating, and the significance of both paintings,” writes Salomon, “when it comes to Giorgione’s Three Philosophers and Bellini’s St. Francis in the Desert, we know much less than we think we do.” What is certain is that these paintings occupied the same Venetian home soon after their creation, even if the specific location of Taddeo Contarini’s residence in the neighborhood of Cannaregio has been up for debate. Marcantonio Michiel writes that Bellini painted his St. Francis for Zuan Michiel, and the painting was then acquired by Taddeo Contarini (ca. 1466–1540) soon thereafter. It is possible that Giorgione’s Three Philosophers was a direct commission by this powerful and supposedly unscrupulous Venetian merchant—one even intended to complement the Bellini. While he may or may not have painted it for Contarini’s collection specifically, Giorgione most likely studied with Bellini, and so St. Francis might still have been front and center in his mind.

The last time these paintings were seen in one place was between 1556 and 1636. Like a flash of light of some divine rapture, their being brought together in this spectacular exhibition makes their connections manifest once again.

1.   “Bellini and Giorgione in the House of Taddeo Contarini” opened at Frick Madison, New York, on November 9, 2023, and remains on view through February 4, 2024.

Under Pressure

Under Pressure

On “Max Beckmann: The Formative Years, 1915–1925” at Neue Galerie.

Max Beckmann reflected the traumas of the First World War from his own German perspective. As a volunteer medical orderly in East Prussia in 1914, he wrote to his first wife, Minna Beckmann-Tube, that he “experienced dreadful things and died myself with them several times.” A year later, he suffered a nervous breakdown while serving in Belgium. An exhibition now at Neue Galerie looks to what the show calls Beckmann’s “formative years,” from 1915 through 1925, following this wartime service, in a focused presentation that helps us better locate one of the last century’s more enigmatic artists.1 Curated by Olaf Peters, a professor at Martin Luther Universität Halle-Wittenberg, “Max Beckmann: The Formative Years, 1915–1925” brings together one hundred works by the artist to present the decade-long period when Beckmann broke away from an Impressionist-like style to pursue what became known as Neue Sachlichkeit (New Objectivity).

For Beckmann, the trenches of the Western Front mirrored something of his own pitched battles with French modernism. He called Henri Matisse, for example, one of the “untalented persons” of contemporary art. As Peters notes in the exhibition catalogue, “Max Beckmann adopted early on a position against the artistic avant-garde and did not shy away from public controversy when doing so.” In the face of Fauvism, Primitivism, Expressionism, and the other -isms of modern painting, Beckmann looked to create his own distinctly Germanic contemporary art, one influenced by Wilhelm Leibl, Max Liebermann, Adolf Menzel, and other “instructive artists,” as he put it, of the late nineteenth century.

Max Beckmann, Christ and the Sinner, 1917, Oil on canvas, Saint Louis Art Museum, Missouri. © 2023 Artists Rights Society, New York.

Even as Beckmann worked certain elements of cubist fracture and expressionistic draftsmanship into his compositions, he pushed past modernism’s surface interests to remain focused on the depth of pictorial space. “As for myself,” he wrote in a statement titled “The New Program,” “I paint and try to develop my style exclusively in terms of deep space, something that in contrast to superficially decorative art penetrates as far as possible into the very core of nature and the spirit of things.”

Beckmann’s powers of penetration are on display in the exhibition’s compressed opening gallery on Neue’s second floor. The presentation begins with three self-portraits—a drypoint print, a drawing in pen and ink, and another drawing in pencil, all from 1916 and 1917 (on loan respectively from the Museum of Modern Art, New York; the Art Institute of Chicago; and the Kupferstichkabinett, Staatliche Museen zu Berlin). Gaunt and sickly, with hands bony and clutched, the faces here seem “almost too awake,” notes Peters, revealing Beckmann’s alien-like “diagnostic gaze.” Far from romanticized, they are Germanified self-images, ones that turn to the horrors of sight and choose not to look away.

Max Beckmann, Adam and Eve, 1917, Neue Nationalgalerie, Staatliche Museen Zu Berlin, Germany. © 2023 Artists Rights Society, New York.

Those horrors are reflected in Beckmann’s angular and emaciated biblical images to their right—Descent from the Cross (1917, Museum of Modern Art, New York), Christ and the Sinner (1917, Saint Louis Art Museum), and Adam and Eve (1917, Neue Nationalgalerie, Staatliche Museen zu Berlin). “I saw some remarkable things,” Beckmann said of his time at the front. “In the semidarkness of the shelter, half-naked, blood-covered men that were having white bandages applied. Grand and painful in expression. New visions of scourgings of Christ.”

Beckmann’s great gift was to understand how the urgency of contemporary art should be reflected in the substance of painting rather than in its style. Distancing himself from the many movements of modernism—even including the Neue Sachlichkeit with which he became closely associated—Beckmann came to be seen as a “defender of a traditional art oriented around representational skill,” writes Anna Maria Heckmann of Berlinische Galerie, “which is why a reputation as a reactionary clung to him from the perspective of his avant-garde colleagues.”

Max Beckmann, Landscape with Balloon, 1917, Museum Ludwig, Cologne. © 2023 Artists Rights Society, New York.

Nevertheless, in the originality of his vision, unencumbered by any one style, Beckmann ended up outflanking his more radical peers. Compare the classical roundedness of Portrait of Senior Medical Officer Prof. Dr. Philaletes Kuhn (1915, private collection) with the grotesqueries of Adam and Eve (1917, published 1918, Museum of Modern Art, New York). Or contrast the loftiness of Landscape with Balloon (1917, Museum Ludwig, Cologne) with the airlessness of Women’s Bath (1919, Neue Nationalgalerie, Staatliche Museen zu Berlin). As he sought to “build a tower in which humanity can shriek out its rage and despair and all its poor hopes and joys and wild yearning,” Beckmann allowed his draftsmanship and composition to range in unexpected and startling ways.

Upstairs at Neue, the exhibition’s third floor explores this range in greater detail. Some of his portraits, for example the image of his wife from 1924 (Pinakothek der Moderne, Bayerische Staatsgemäldesammlungen, Munich), reveal a Raphael-like softness. Yet even these elegant paintings convey a certain unease. Beckmann’s Portrait of Elsbet Götz (1924, Museum Behnhaus Drägerhaus, Lübeck) depicts a young woman in a green dress in front of a red background, looking out with a reserved gaze. The backstory of this painting, described in the exhibition, contains its own horror. Götz met Beckmann through her brother, a student in art history who worked at the Städel-Museum in Frankfurt am Main as an assistant to the director Georg Swarzenski. She was a kindergarten teacher who founded her own school. Within a decade of sitting for this portrait, due to the rise of National Socialism, as a Jew, Götz was prohibited from teaching non-Jewish children. Despite worsening circumstances, she remained in Germany to care for her mother. In 1942 she was deported to Theresienstadt. In 1944 the Nazis shipped her to Auschwitz, where she was killed. “The figure situated in a warm red backdrop radiates a statuesque calm that testifies to her self-confidence and self-determination,” writes Peters of her resolve to stay in Germany, “thus giving the National Socialists the opportunity to murder Elsbet Götz.”

Even without the benefit of such hindsight, in Götz’s blank stare, her pursed lips, and her folded hands, Beckmann reveals the underlying anxiety of the Weimar years. Political uncertainty and economic upheaval undermined the sophistication of the age and ultimately gave way to graver terrors. The same goes for Paris Society (1925/1931/1947, Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum), one of the highlights of the exhibition, just to the left of these portraits. Beckmann worked on this assembly of figures multiple times over a twenty-year period, adding famous faces, such as that of Jean-Paul Sartre, along the way. And yet much is off-kilter in their interactions as they look in different directions, pushed together in unnatural proximity. This composition in circus-like colors tilts as though it were the last cocktail party on a sinking ship. Hidden in the lower-right corner, hand to head, Beckmann includes a profile of himself.

Max Beckmann, Self-portrait in front of Red Curtain, 1923, Oil on canvas, Private collection. © Artists Rights Society, New York.

Beckmann never abandoned pictorial depth. Instead he placed the content of compositions under ever greater pressure as he squeezed his figures together. “Most important for me is volume,” he said, “trapped in height and width.” In the confines of the picture frame, as he wrote in his “Creative Credo” of 1918–20, “I try to capture the terrible, thrilling monster of life’s vitality and to confine it, to beat it down and to strangle it with crystal-clear, razor-sharp lines and planes.” Far from seeking transcendence, “in my paintings I accused God of everything he has done wrong.”

The darkness of Beckmann’s vision is best seen in the drawings and suites of prints spread across Neue’s upper floor. Exceptional among these is his Hell portfolio of 1919 (Museum of Modern Art, New York). Originally published in an edition of seventy-five signed copies by J. B. Neumann Verlag, Die Hölle depicts the chaotic scenes of the post-war city, where battles continued to rage over Germany’s future. On the cover Beckmann offers a grotesque self-portrait set in a frame. Beneath he includes a message written in script: “We ask the esteemed public to step up. It has the pleasant prospect of not being bored for perhaps ten minutes. Anyone who is not satisfied will have his money returned.”

Max Beckmann, “The Way Home” from the Hell portfolio, 1919, Lithograph, Museum of Modern Art, New York. © 2023 Artists Rights Society

The carnivalesque invitation opens onto the hellscape of the German street, as figures are pushed and crushed in a stampede of images. Rifles and machine guns are fired into the crowds. Hungry children pray around a barren table. Prostitutes expose themselves by candlelight. Drunk veterans sing patriotic songs. In a final plate, titled The Family, Beckmann again depicts himself. As Beckmann points away, his child in a soldier’s helmet plays with toy grenades while his wife holds up her hands. The playacting must go to sleep.

Neumann published a thousand smaller lithographic booklets of this series, which were offered for two marks each, but not a copy was sold. The hell was all too real in inflationary Weimar. Nevertheless, the grotesqueries of the series, framed by Beckmann’s own self-image, helped inform the artist’s paintings in the 1920s. Repeatedly presenting himself in high-style reserve, Beckmann here becomes the elegant ringleader for his circus of Weimar excess. He looks directly out through tired eyes, often with cigarette in hand, in his Self-Portrait on Yellow Ground with Cigarette (1923, Museum of Modern Art, New York), Self-Portrait in Front of Red Curtain (1923, private collection), Self-Portrait with White Cap (1926, anonymous), and Self-Portrait in Tuxedo (1927, Harvard Art Museum).

Max Beckmann, Self-portrait with Cap, 1926, Oil on canvas, Private collection. © Artists Rights Society, New York.

Displayed alongside these self-portraits are Beckmann’s dense ensemble compositions, often arranged in a chaotic vertical format that takes time to absorb in full. Here the fun of his garishly colored beach scenes and carnival visions are cut through with dread. In The Trapeze (1923, Toledo Museum of Art), arms and legs have been twisted in a knot as a breast is seen falling out of its costume. In The Dream (1921, Saint Louis Art Museum), musicians have become tangled around their instruments as a figure with amputated hands embraces a fish. In The Bark (1926, private collection), passengers founder in an overloaded boat, while in Lido (1924, Saint Louis Museum) the swimmers seem to have been cut in two by the waves and their own jagged costumes.

Beckmann’s claims for a particular German art did not stop him from losing his teaching position in Frankfurt and being labeled a degenerate by the Nazi regime. In 1937 he went into self-imposed exile in the Netherlands where he tried to obtain an exit visa to emigrate to the United States. As he became trapped in Amsterdam for the next ten years, he painted his most well-known work—the haunting triptychs that merged his vertical formats with an increasingly enigmatic iconography to speak to his spiritual and physical isolation. It was only in 1947, three years before his death at age sixty-six, that Beckmann was able to move away, joining the St. Louis School of Fine Arts and teaching at Washington University and the Brooklyn Museum.

It is a loss for this focused show that we do not see something of Beckmann’s late work for which he is best known. It would also have been illuminating to include some examples of his younger production, such as his Sinking of the Titanic of 1912–13 or his Self-Portrait (Laughing) of 1910, which we only find in reproduction in the exhibition catalogue. If “Beckmann only achieved a unique artistic style because of the war,” as Olaf Peters writes, it helps to get some sense of what came before as well as a better appreciation of what is to come.

Max Beckmann, The Dream, 1921, Oil on canvas, Saint Louis Art Museum, © 2023 Artists Rights Society, New York. 

“It’s stupid to love humanity,” Beckmann said, “nothing but a heap of egoism (and we are a part of it too). But I love it anyway. I love its meanness, its banality, its dullness, its cheap contentment, and its oh-so-very-rare heroism.” In capturing what he called “transcendental objectivity,” which he saw as coming “out of a deep love for nature and humanity,” Beckmann displayed his own heroics. He fought for painting and won his victories on his own terms.

1.   “Max Beckmann: The Formative Years, 1915–1925” opened at Neue Galerie, New York, on October 5, 2023, and remains on view through January 15, 2024.

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).