FAUVISM · WORK

The Green Stripe

Henri Matisse · 1905

A small portrait of his wife with a band of pure green straight down her face, where Matisse used color to do the work of light and shadow, so it stops describing the face and starts building it.

The canvas

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Henri Matisse, The Green Stripe, 1905. Oil on canvas. 1 ft 4 in × 1 ft 1 in.
Statens Museum for Kunst, Copenhagen. Purchased 1936 at the Tetzen-Lund estate sale, by the Ingeniør J. Rump and Elisabeth Rump Fund

Look closer

Find these on the canvas above

The green stripe down the nose and forehead
Dead center of the face, a vertical band running from the hairline, down the bridge of the nose, to the top lip
This green band is the painting’s title and its whole structure. It splits the face into two halves and does the job a shadow would do in an ordinary portrait, turning the form, giving it volume, except there is no shading anywhere on the canvas, just a stripe of flat green standing in for the modelling (the gradual light-to-dark shading painters use to fake a round, solid form). It is the single clearest example in early modern art of color taking over a job that drawing and tonal shading used to own.
The two-tone face: a warm half and a cool half
Either side of the green stripe, the side carrying the orange-and-red chin and ear reads as the lit, warm half; the other side is a cooler yellow-ochre
One side of the face is keyed warm, pink with orange and red worked along the chin and the ear, reading as the side in direct light. The other side is a cooler yellow-ochre (a dull earth-yellow), reading as half-light. There is no gradual blend between them; the green stripe is the only seam. Light and shadow have been translated entirely into two flat temperatures of color, side by side, with the stripe as the hinge.
The background split warm and cool
The flat field behind the head, divided into a warm zone on one side and a cool zone on the other
The background is not a single backdrop but is divided into two zones, just like the face: pink and orange on one side, teal-green on the other. Matisse carries the warm-and-cool split of the head out into the whole picture, so the room behind her echoes the structure of her face. Color is organizing the entire surface, not just describing a wall, there is nothing behind her to describe at all.
The hair, brows and eyes in deep blue
The hair piled up top, plus the eyebrows and the eyes
Hair, brows and eyes are all a deep blue, a color no hair is, set against the green stripe and the warm flesh. It is the clearest tell that Matisse is choosing colors for how they ring against their neighbors, not for what the thing actually looks like. The blue cools and anchors the top of the head against the heat of the cheeks.
The high collar in teal
At the base of the portrait, the neckline of her blouse or dress
She wears an orange-and-pink blouse or dress closed with a teal (blue-green) neckline, the same blue-green family as the green stripe and the cool side of the background, tying the bottom of the picture back to its top. And note what is not here: no hat. The hat belongs to the other 1905 portrait of Amélie, Woman with a Hat.
The brushwork: flat blocks, not blended modelling
Anywhere across the face and background, the broad areas of unbroken color
The paint is laid in firm, flat sections of pure unmixed color, each one defining a feature or a zone, with hard edges between them rather than soft, blended transitions. This is closer to the flat color-areas of Gauguin and Van Gogh than to Impressionism’s flicker, and it is why the head reads as a built construction, almost a mask, rather than a soft, rounded, lifelike face.

The story · 5 chapters

~18 min total

Collioure & Paris · 1905

A breakthrough summer, and the autumn after

Matisse and Derain spend the summer at Collioure firing color off its leash. Most likely that autumn, back in Paris, he turns the new method on a portrait of his own wife, Amélie.

The making

A green stripe as the spine of a face

One structural idea: a vertical band of pure green runs down the center of the face, splitting it into a warm half and a cool half, and doing the job a shadow does, turning the form, giving volume, with no shading anywhere.

The canvas

How to see the stripe as structure

The green meridian, the two-tone face, the blue hair, the teal collar, and a background split warm-and-cool just like the head, a whole picture organized by color, on a canvas the size of a sheet of legal paper.

The reception

A mask the friends recoiled from

Part of the Fauve color uproar, and harder than its famous companion Woman with a Hat. A friend of Michael and Sarah Stein called it a demented caricature; in 1910 a critic called it Matisse’s punishment of Amélie. Both are readings, not facts.

After

The road to Copenhagen

Bought by the American collectors Michael and Sarah Stein through a Paris gallery in 1906, then across war-time Europe into a great Danish collection, and finally to SMK in 1936, bought at an estate sale, paid for by the Rump fund.

Autumn 1905

Painted

1′4″ × 1′1″

Dimensions

SMK Copenhagen

Now at

Provenance

Every hand it passed through

1905–1906

Henri Matisse (the artist)

Paris

Painted in 1905, most likely that autumn back in Paris after the Collioure summer. Sold within months through the Paris dealer Galerie Druet.

1906–c.1914

Michael and Sarah Stein

Paris

The American collectors (Michael was Gertrude and Leo Stein’s eldest brother) bought it through Galerie Druet, in the spring of 1906. The Steins were the avant-garde’s key American patrons; the portrait hung in their Paris flat. (Keep distinct from Leo and Gertrude, who bought Woman with a Hat for 500 francs off the Salon wall.)

c.1914–1919

Stored in Germany (the Moll circle, Berlin)

Berlin

With the outbreak of the First World War the painting was left in Germany; sale negotiations in 1917–18 led to a temporary seizure by the dealer Fritz Gurlitt before it returned to Paris around 1919. (The German-storage years are the least documented link in the chain.)

c.1920–1936

Christian Tetzen-Lund

Copenhagen

The Danish grain merchant and major collector of French modernism brought it to Copenhagen around 1920. He dispersed most of his collection in the 1920s but kept this portrait until his death in 1936.

1936–today

estate-sale purchase

Statens Museum for KunstMuseum

Copenhagen

Purchased at the Tetzen-Lund estate auction in 1936, financed by the Ingeniør J. Rump and Elisabeth Rump Fund (the Rump fund). Inv. KMSr171, the KMSr prefix marks the Rump collection. This was a fund-financed purchase, not part of Johannes Rump’s own 1928 gift. On permanent view.