The cage of wild beasts

That autumn the picture travelled up to Paris for the Salon d’Automne (the “Autumn Salon”), the young alternative exhibition that had started two years earlier as a looser, more adventurous rival to the stuffy official Salon. It was held at the Grand Palais, the great glass-and-iron exhibition hall on the Champs-Élysées, and it ran from 18 October to 25 November 1905. Open Window, Collioure hung in Room VII (Salle VII), and it did not hang there alone.

Room VII was a concentration of the wildest new painting in France: canvases by Matisse, by his summer companion Derain, by Maurice de Vlaminck and others, all of them painted in the same off-the-leash color. And in the middle of this roomful of violent canvases stood two small, prim, Renaissance-style marble busts by a conventional sculptor named Albert Marque, sober little things that looked as if they had wandered in from a different century. Hung in the same room was Matisse’s other 1905 lightning rod, Woman with a Hat(a portrait of his wife with her face built of green and mauve), which drew the loudest noise of all. The two Matisses, the open window and the woman in the hat, were the room’s twin scandals.

Here is where a famous story gets told badly, so we’ll tell it carefully. On 17 October 1905, the day before the show even opened to the public, the critic Louis Vauxcelles (pronounced “voh-SELL”) previewed it in the newspaper Gil Blas, looked at those gentle Marque busts surrounded by all that howling color, and wrote a line that stuck: “Donatello chez les fauves”, “Donatello among the wild beasts.” (Donatello was a great sculptor of the Italian Renaissance; les fauves is French for “the wild beasts.”) That printed phrase is what gave the movement its name: Fauvism, the art of les fauves, the wild beasts.

And then the story gets embroidered, so keep three things straight. The line was about the whole room, prompted by the contrast between the calm Marque busts and the savage canvases around them; it was not aimed at this one painting, so do not let anyone tell you that Open Window, Collioure “named Fauvism,” because the room did, and the busts did. Nor did the painters coin the word: a hostile critic did, and they only later wore the insult as a badge. And the most beloved version of all, in which an unnamed passer-by supposedly turned to Matisse in front of the room and said “Donatello in the cage with the wild beasts,” comes from Vauxcelles himself, but only in a book he wrote in 1939, thirty-four years after the fact. So the printed 1905 line is solid, documented history; the live, spoken “cage” quote is the critic’s own much-later retelling, and it should be held at arm’s length, a story rather than a scene we know happened.

One more clean separation, because the two pictures get blurred constantly. It was Woman with a Hat, not this canvas, that the American collectors Leo and Gertrude Stein bought off the wall at the close of the 1905 Salon, for somewhere around five hundred francs. That purchase belongs to the woman in the hat. Open Window, Collioure went its own quieter way out of the show.