A breakthrough summer, and the autumn after

In the summer of 1905, Henri Matisse (the painter who would lead the movement called Fauvism) took his family south to Collioure (a small fishing port on the French Mediterranean coast, almost at the Spanish border) and spent the season painting beside a younger painter named André Derain. What the two of them did there, in brief: they pushed color off its leash. Pigment straight from the tube, bare canvas left showing between the strokes, and above all color chosen for the feeling it gave rather than the thing it described, a pink boat, a turquoise hillside, a road run orange because the picture wanted it orange. This is where Fauvism (from les fauves, “the wild beasts,” an insult a hostile critic was about to coin) is actually made.

Hold one fact lightly, because the popular books muddle it: The Green Stripe was most likely not painted at Collioure. The Statens Museum for Kunst in Copenhagen, which owns it, dates it to the autumn of 1905, after Matisse had returned to Paris. So picture the sequence. A summer on the coast inventing a method out of harbors and hillsides. Then the trip home. Then, back in the Paris studio, the painter turns that brand-new, sunstruck way of using color away from boats and rocks and onto the one face he knew best in the world, his wife’s.

The face is Amélie Matisse, born Amélie Noellie Parayre, whom Matisse had married in 1898. It is worth saying plainly who she was, because the picture is going to do something a little merciless to her and the temptation is to read her as a victim of it. She was not a passive prop. Before the marriage she had run her own hat shop in Paris. For some four decades she was Matisse’s business manager, his household manager, his most frequent model, and his fiercest advocate, the person who kept the enterprise of being Matisse afloat in the years when almost nobody was buying. She was, in short, the most-painted face of early Matisse and a full partner in his career, and you should keep both of those facts in your head while you look at what he did to her here.

That same autumn, the 1905 Salon d’Automne (one of the big annual juried art exhibitions in Paris, this one founded to give newer painting a wall) opened at the Grand Palais and put Matisse’s Collioure canvases in a room the critic Louis Vauxcelles mocked as a cage of wild beasts. That is the show that gave the movement its name. But the picture at the center of that scandal, the one of Amélie that the public recoiled from, was a different portrait: Woman with a Hat, her face stroked in green and violet and orange, which Matisse’s American patrons Leo and Gertrude Stein bought off the wall for 500 francs. The Green Stripe is its quieter, harder, more intimate companion, same wife, same year, same idea taken further. It belongs to that moment, in dialogue with it. It just was not the painting on the wall that caused the uproar. Keep the two straight; almost everyone gets them tangled.