A fishing port near the border
The movement was not made in Paris and not made at a Salon. It was made over a few weeks of one summer in a small Mediterranean fishing port called Collioure, tucked against the Spanish border in the far south of France. In early summer 1905 Matisse, then in his mid-thirties and badly short of money, invited Derain, eleven years younger, to come paint with him there. They worked side by side in a southern light far harder and more saturated than anything in gray Paris, and in those weeks they did the thing the whole fuse had been building toward: they pushed color past description entirely.
Squeezing it straight from the tube
The method was almost insultingly simple, which is part of why it scandalized people. These were oil paintings (oil paint being pigment ground into linseed oil, the standard medium of the era) made on canvas, the stretched cloth that is both the surface a painter works on and, finished, the thing we mean when we call a picture “a canvas.” Matisse and Derain squeezed pure color straight from the tube onto that cloth, vermilion, cobalt, chrome yellow, with little or no mixing to soften it toward anything a real harbor wears. They left bare white canvas showing between the strokes, so the picture breathes and flickers instead of sealing shut like a window. And they keyed the color to sensation rather than fact: if the heat and dazzle of the port made Matisse want a pink wall and a turquoise boat next to an orange sail, he painted a pink wall and a turquoise boat and an orange sail, and let the real local colors go hang.
Open Window, Collioure is the clean demonstration. You are looking through a window frame at masts and water, and there is not one passage of “realistic” color in it: the inner wall is a screen of pink and pistachio verticals, the boats are dabs of pink, the sea and sky are streaks of pure blue, green and rose. Nothing is modeled into roundness. The whole canvas reads as a flat, bright, patterned surface, a wall of color that happens to add up to a harbor. (This particular subject, a window thrown open onto the world, becomes a Matisse signature he will paint for the next forty years; it starts here.)
Made before it was named
By the end of that summer the thing existed. Back in Paris that autumn, carrying the Collioure breakthrough with him, Matisse painted the portrait that would soon detonate at the Salon, Woman with a Hat, his wife Amélie shown with her face stroked in greens, violets and oranges. Derain, for his part, had painted the Collioure harbor that summer in the same blaze. None of it had a name yet, no critic had insulted it, no group had formed, no word like “Fauvism” existed. The key thing to keep: the movement was fully invented, on canvas, in a fishing port, before the art world had any idea what to call it or any chance to be appalled. The appalling came in the autumn, in Paris, in a room that would get a nickname.