Hot-pink ground, violet trees, a ring of dancers

Stand in front of it. The first thing that hits you, before you can sort out a single figure, is the color, and the fact that none of it is true. The ground is not green; it runs hot pink and orange, the color of a sunset spread out under your feet. The tree trunks are not brown; they go violet and green. The sky is not blue; it shades from lemon-yellow to rose. There is no shading, no careful light-and-dark to round the forms out, just big flat areas of saturated color butted up against each other. This is the Fauve move at full volume: color set free from the job of describing the world, free to answer only to feeling and to the design of the surface. The mockery Matisse had taken the year before for one small green stripe down a face, he has here turned into an entire luminous world.

Now find the people, because the meadow is full of them. This is an Arcadia, an idealized, dreamlike countryside out of myth, and it is populated with nude figures both at rest and in motion. There is no story, no event, nothing happening that you could narrate. There is only ease. The “joy of life” of the title is not a plot; it is a mood, the pure bodily pleasure of lying in the sun with nowhere to be.

Let your eye move through them. In the foreground, at the left and center, figures recline on the rose-and-orange ground, stretched out in pure leisure. Their bodies are drawn as long, snaking, sinuous curves, what artists call arabesques (a flowing serpentine line, the visual equivalent of a slow exhale). Look closely and you will see that the limbs lengthen and bend past anything a real body does. That is not a mistake. Matisse cared more about the music of that curving line than about anatomy, and he rhymes it everywhere, so that a hip and a tree branch and the edge of the sky all seem to belong to the same slow rhythm.

Now look at how each body is held. Every figure is fenced by a single dark contour line, drawn thick, the way the leading in a stained-glass window holds a pane of color. There is no soft, brushy modeling inside that line, no shadow rounding the form; Matisse lets the bounding outline do all the work that shading used to do, and then fills it with one flat, even field of paint. Once you see those heavy dark edges you cannot unsee them, and they are exactly what one furious viewer would fix on.

At the bottom center, a seated nude plays a double pipe, a kind of double flute, the unmistakable signal of the pastoral, the music of shepherds. Off in the lower-right corner, a pair of figures embrace, the frankly sensual note that, together with all the lounging and the piping, makes the picture a hymn to pleasure rather than a polite mythology. And far back, in the center distance, on the open meadow, a small ring of figures dances, joined hand to hand in a circle. That little round-dance would grow up into one of the most famous paintings of the twentieth century.

Here is where the picture rewards a slow look. Compare the piper at the bottom center to the kissing couple at the bottom right. Their relative sizes only make sense if you decide the piper is a small child. But then look at the figures standing just behind them, who are suddenly enormous, giants by comparison. The scale does not hold together, and it is not supposed to. Matisse sized his figures for the composition, for how they balance and rhyme across the surface, not for where they stand in space. A painter obeying perspective makes far things small. Matisse makes things whatever size the design wants them. The embracing couple, tiny against the looming figures behind, is the clearest single spot to catch him doing it.

And the space itself is flattened on purpose. Notice the two big trees at the upper left and right, whose curved trunks and heavy foliage bend inward over the scene, arching across the top like a stage curtain. They do not open a deep view into the distance; they close the picture off and press everything forward, flat against the surface. The same serpentine line that shapes the bodies shapes the trees, so the whole canvas reads as one woven, shallow, decorative pattern. You are not looking through a window at a real meadow. You are looking at a beautifully designed flat surface that has been made to feel like joy. That is the radical thing under the pretty thing: Matisse has taken the most traditional subject in European painting and rebuilt it as pure decoration in the highest sense, a surface tuned for pleasure, color, and line.

It is worth naming plainly what this Arcadia is made of. Almost every figure in it is a nude woman, and the picture belongs to a long European line of male painters staging the female body as an emblem of ease and pleasure, the same line that runs back through the Titian, Ingres, and Cézanne nudes Matisse was drawing on. The buyers were men too: Leo Stein first, then Christian Tetzen-Lund, then Albert Barnes, the male connoisseurs for whom such pictures had long been made. Matisse was working squarely inside that convention rather than questioning it. What was radical here was the color and the design, not the choice of subject.