Signac buys it, and the door opens

The title is not Matisse’s invention. It comes straight out of a poem by Charles Baudelaire (1821–1867), the great French poet of modern city life, whose 1857 collection Les Fleurs du mal (“The Flowers of Evil”) is one of the founding books of modern poetry. In one of its most famous poems, L’Invitation au voyage (“Invitation to the Voyage”), a man dreams of carrying his beloved away to a perfect, ordered, sensual elsewhere, and the dream closes on a refrain: “Là, tout n’est qu’ordre et beauté, / Luxe, calme et volupté”(“There, all is order and beauty, / luxury, calm and pleasure”). Matisse took the last line whole and made it the name of his picture. The painting is that dreamed elsewhere, rendered in paint: the calm, the luxury, the pleasure, an invented Arcadia on a Mediterranean shore.

The painting’s first owner was the one person who would most appreciate it: Signac himself bought it, around the time of its 1905 debut, directly out of the avant-garde’s own show. There is a quiet pleasure in that, the older master buying the younger man’s homage to his own method, his rulebook turned into a beach. (No purchase price is recorded, so we will not invent one. A popular detail has Signac hanging it in his Saint-Tropez villa, named La Hune; that is reported rather than confirmed by the museum record, so take it lightly.) The picture then stayed in Signac’s family; the museum that owns it today lists its earlier home as the former collection of Mme Cachin-Signac, Signac’s daughter.

It entered the French national collections in 1982 by a mechanism worth glossing, because it explains why two museums have a claim on it. The painting came to the state by dation, a French arrangement that lets an heir pay inheritance tax with a work of art instead of cash. By that route it became the property of the Centre Pompidou, Paris’s national museum of modern art (inventory number AM 1982-96), which is the painting’s legal owner to this day. Then, in 1985, just before the Musée d’Orsay opened, the Pompidou placed the picture on long-term depositat the Orsay, the museum on the Left Bank devoted to nineteenth-century and early-modern French art. So the situation is a little unusual: the Centre Pompidou owns it; the Musée d’Orsay shows it, where it normally hangs among the Neo-Impressionist and Fauve pictures it helped bridge.

And then Matisse walked away from the very method he had just mastered. Within months of finishing this picture he abandoned the systematic dot, and his reason was as much about form as about color. He found that dividing the color also divided the form: all those separate dabs dissolved the firm outline and the flat, solid area of color he was beginning to want. The discipline that made the surface shimmer also broke up the very shapes he was trying to hold together. (He later put the idea something like this, that the broken-up color broke up the form along with it. The exact wording is not securely his, so we will keep it as the substance of his complaint rather than a quotation.)

So he dropped the dots and kept the freed color, and that combination, flat areas of pure, arbitrary, emotional color with firm shapes, is Fauvism. The next year he made it whole in Le Bonheur de vivre (“The Joy of Life,” 1905–06), the same Arcadian-bather dream painted now in broad sheets of unbroken color, the fully radical canvas that Luxe only points toward. Which is why this earlier painting, for all that it is built in someone else’s technique, is repeatedly called the starting point of Fauvism: not because it is Fauve, but because making it taught Matisse exactly what he had to leave behind. He learned the dot in order to throw it away. The picture is the doorway, painted just before he stepped through it and closed it for good.