After the wild beasts, the statement

In the autumn of 1905, Henri Matisse had just survived the worst public mauling of his life. At that year’s big Paris art show, the Salon d’Automne, he and a few friends had hung a roomful of paintings done in raw, unmixed, screaming color, and a critic, walking through the room and spotting a tame little classical sculpture marooned among them, had quipped that it was like a Donatello among les fauves, the wild beasts. The name stuck to the painters, and the laughter stuck to Matisse. Most people, after a public drubbing, get cautious. Matisse did the opposite. He decided his answer to the mockery would be to go bigger: one enormous, deliberate, planned-to-the-inch canvas that would carry the wild color further than anyone, including the wild beasts, had dared.

That canvas is Le bonheur de vivre, French for “the joy of life” (and that is the title in lowercase, the way the French write it; in English it is usually called simply The Joy of Life). He painted it over the winter, between roughly October 1905 and March 1906, and when it was finished it was nearly six feet tall and almost eight feet wide, a wall-sized field of naked figures lazing, kissing, piping music, and dancing in a meadow lit by colors no meadow has ever worn. It is, in plain terms, a picture of careless pleasure, painted at the size museums reserve for battles and saints.

Matisse unveiled it in the spring of 1906 at the Salon des Indépendants, and where he chose to show it is part of the story. In Paris there were two kinds of art show. There was the official, juried Salon, where a committee of established painters decided what got hung and what got rejected, the gatekeeper that had set French taste for two centuries. And there was the Salon des Indépendants, founded in 1884 by painters tired of being thrown out: no jury, no prizes, no committee. Pay your fee and your picture goes on the wall. It was the natural home for work too new or too rude for the official jury, which is exactly what Matisse had made. The show ran from about March 20 to April 20, 1906.

It became the sensation of the season, and not in a flattering way. The cadmium colors (the intense, modern, factory-made pigments, cadmium yellows and reds, that let painters hit a brightness older paints could not) and the warped, perspective-free space drew a public outcry; visitors protested, critics fumed, and some genuinely worried that this kind of thing was the endof French painting, that the great national tradition was being thrown overboard for a children’s-paintbox dream. Which, in a sense, it was. That was the point. Matisse had not made a peace offering. He had doubled the bet.