Oil on canvas
In Landscape at Collioure, Henri Matisse applied oil paint to an unprimed canvas, mostly with quick, sketchy brushstrokes and sometimes using paint directly from the tube. Though he left parts of the canvas unpainted, so that its raw, woven surface shows through between his brushstrokes, this painting is considered a finished work.
Landscape at Collioure reflects the point at which Matisse began to use a more instinctive, spontaneous way of painting, unparalleled among his contemporaries. The landscapes he painted in the summer of 1905 were “wilder, more reckless than any subsequently produced in his career,” according to Matisse scholar and former MoMA curator John Elderfield. “In the works of that period color speaks for itself with a directness previously unknown in Western painting, and speaks directly too of the emotional response to the natural world that required changing the color of this world the better to render that emotion.”
Provenance Research Project
This work is included in the Provenance Research Project, which investigates the ownership history of works in MoMA's collection.
1954 Louise Smith, New York (Purchased from Sidney Janis Gallery, New York on November 3, 1954)
1990 The Museum of Modern Art, New York (Gift and Bequest of Louise Reinhard Smith)
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Henri Matisse
French, 1869–1954 428 works onlineThroughout his decades-long career as a painter, sculptor, draftsman, and printmaker, Henri Matisse continuously searched, in his own words, “for the same things, which I have perhaps realized by different means.
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Fauvism
A style of painting in the first decade of the 20th century that emphasized strong, vibrant color and bold brushstrokes over realistic or representational qualities.
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Henri Matisse
Gallery 506Henri Matisse’s audacious experimentation with form and color was inseparable from his dedication to an art of harmonious expression, an ambition lost on most of his contemporary viewers.
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