The debut, before the wild beasts

In the spring of 1905, the finished picture went on the wall at the Salon des Indépendants in Paris. A word on that venue, because it matters. The official Salon, the state-backed annual exhibition, had a jury that decided who got in, and it had a long history of throwing out anything new. In answer, a group of artists (Seurat and Signac among the founders) had set up in 1884 a rival show with no jury and no prizes: anyone who paid the small fee could hang. That was the Salon des Indépendants, the “independents,” and it was where the new painting got seen. Matisse’s big divisionist beach hung there in the spring of 1905, and it read as exactly what it was: an ambitious, accomplished Neo-Impressionistpicture by a serious painter working in Signac’s manner.

Here is the fact this picture is most often gotten wrong. It is constantly called the doorway to Fauvism, and that is fair. But it is not itself a Fauve painting, and it was not received as one, for a simple reason of the calendar. Fauvism got its name later that same year, in the autumn of 1905, at a different exhibition, the Salon d’Automne (the “autumn Salon”). There, Matisse and his friends hung canvases of hot, arbitrary, undisguised color, and a critic named Louis Vauxcelles, seeing a conventional marble sculpture standing among them, quipped that it was like “Donatello parmi les fauves,” “Donatello among the wild beasts.” The phrase stuck. Les fauves, the wild beasts, became the name of the movement.

But all of that happened in the autumn. Luxe, calme et volupté had debuted in the spring, months earlier, painted in careful divisionist dabs and read as Neo-Impressionism. So the honest way to place it is this: it points toward Fauvism, it does not yet belong to it. It is the doorway Matisse was about to step through, photographed just before he opened the door. Call it the first Fauve painting and you have your seasons backwards.