A green stripe as the spine of a face

The whole picture turns on a single structural decision, and you can state it in one sentence: a vertical band of pure green runs down the center of the face, from the hairline, down the bridge of the nose, to the top lip. That is the title (The Green Stripe, in French La Raie verte) and it is also, literally, the skeleton the rest of the painting hangs on. Everything else in the picture is arranged around that stripe. (The museum that owns it, by the way, prefers the English title The Green Line, so you will find it under that name at SMK.)

To see why it matters, you have to know the job it is quietly doing. In a normal portrait, a painter gives a face its roundness and weight through modelling, the gradual shading from light into shadow, lit cheek easing into shaded jaw, that fools the eye into reading a flat patch of paint as a solid, three-dimensional head. It is the oldest trick in Western painting. Matisse throws it out. There is no gradual shading anywhere on this canvas. Instead, the green stripe does the modelling’s work: it marks the turn of the form, the ridge of the nose where a face catches and loses the light, and it splits the head into a warm half and a cool halfthe way light and shadow would split a real face. The stripe is not a green shadow that was really there on Amélie’s nose (nobody’s nose is green) it is color standing in for the whole apparatus of light and modelling.

Matisse said as much himself. His standing program for color was blunt: “When I apply green, that does not mean grass. When I apply blue, that does not mean sky.” The green down his wife’s nose is exactly that principle made visible, a color picked for the job it does in the picture, not for anything it names in the world.

So look at what the stripe builds: a warm half and a cool half, two flat temperatures of color set side by side, with the green band as the only seam between them. In an ordinary portrait those two would melt into each other across the curve of the face. Here they do not melt at all, light and shadow have been translated, completely, into two patches of color with a green line down the join. That is the entire engine of the picture. There is a reason it is a green line and not some other color: green is the complement of the pink-and-red of flesh, the maximum cool set against the maximum warm, so it rings hardest where the two halves meet and reads as the coolest possible seam.

The technique is the Collioure method turned on a portrait. The paint is laid in firm, flat blocks of pure, unmixed, deliberately arbitrary color (each block defining a feature or a zone) rather than blended into the soft, broken light the Impressionists chased. It is much closer to the flat saturated color-areas of Gauguin and Van Gogh (the two painters whose example stands behind all of Fauvism) than to anything Impressionist. Matisse has stepped fully past painting the flicker of real light. He is building a head out of slabs of color the way you might build a small stained-glass window: piece against piece, each one chosen for how it sounds against its neighbor.

And this, more than any other single picture, is the textbook demonstration of the thing Fauvism is famous for, color cut loose from description. A harbor painted in colors it does not own is striking. A living human face, split top to bottom by a stripe of green that no face has ever worn, is unforgettable. It is the clearest, most legible proof that color had quit its old job of telling you what things look like and taken up a new one: building the picture.