Open Window, Collioure

A small canvas of a window thrown open onto a Mediterranean fishing harbor, painted in colors no harbor ever wore, from the summer that produced Fauvism.

1. 1
   The boats over their own reflections

   Center, the middle band, out on the water beyond the balcony rail

   Small masted sailing boats ride the harbor, their masts a rust orange-red, their hulls picked out in blue, pink, green and orange, each one sitting over its own smear of colored reflection on the water. They are the one clearly readable “real subject” of the whole view: everything around them loosens toward pure pattern, but the boats stay boats. They are also the literal trade of the town: Collioure in 1905 was a working anchovy-and-sardine port with a fleet of more than a hundred boats, and these are that fishing fleet. If you want to prove to yourself that this is a window onto an actual working harbor and not an abstraction, the boats are where you look.
2. 2
   The flower pots on the balcony

   Lower center, on the floor of the shallow balcony just inside the window opening

   A little cluster of potted plants sits on the balcony floor, the pots themselves dabbed in red, orange and blue. They are a near foreground, the closest thing in the picture to where you’re standing, and they do quiet structural work: by sitting right under your eye they shove the harbor back and turn the middle of the canvas into deep space. A small domestic detail, a few pots on a sill, holding open the whole distance to the sea.
3. 3
   The open casement window

   The two tall leaves swinging in from the left and right edges, with their cross-bars and small panes

   A large French window stands open, its two casement leaves swung inward toward you from either edge, carrying scribbled dabs of green that read as climbing vines down their sides. This window frame is the literal skeleton of the picture: the wall holds the window, the window frames the middle ground, the balcony crops the harbor, the harbor runs out to the horizon. It is a structure of frames within frames, and the casement is the frame you look through first.
4. 4
   The flat pink and green side-walls

   The flat vertical bands at the far left and far right edges, the interior wall to one side, the window-leaf to the other

   Down each edge of the canvas runs a flat slab of color, the interior wall on one side and the open leaf on the other, laid in as broad unbroken planes (the National Gallery–affiliated reading names them peacock blue and fuchsia pink). These calm side-bands frame the busy center, and the point to take from them is that the color is invented: this is not the actual paint of an actual room, it is whatever hue Matisse decided the picture needed there.
5. 5
   The patchwork of pure, unmixed color

   Across the whole canvas, comparing the broken dashes of sky and water to the flat slabs of the walls and the scribbled dabs of the vines

   Every zone of the picture is built from a different mark: flat planes for the interior, short broken dashes (the divided touch Matisse borrowed from the dot painters) for the sky and water, quick scribbled strokes for the foliage. The colors go down pure and unmixed, set in complementary pairs that make each other ring, orange against blue in the masts and hulls, red against green in the blossoms and leaves. The whole surface is a patchwork of separate, deliberate, non-naturalistic touches.
6. 6
   The dissolved line between inside and outside

   The seam where the balcony rail and window opening meet the water, the middle of the canvas

   There is no firm line where the room stops and the harbor begins. The same pinks and greens run from the interior wall, across the sill and the vines, and straight out onto the water and the sky, so inside and outside fuse into one continuous field of color. That collapse of the threshold is the picture’s core move: the window is wide open, and the painting refuses to treat the view through it as a separate, distant thing.