In 1905, Henri Matisse and André Derain summered together in Collioure, a fishing port in the South of France. There, they spent a fervid nine weeks upending compositional norms in their paintings and drawings, rendering the boats, the landscape, and each other in swathes of saturated, complementary hues. In “Vertigo of Color: Matisse, Derain, and the Origins of Fauvism,” previously at The Metropolitan Museum of Art and now on view at the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, through May 27, the fruits of this 20th-century link-and-build are on vivid display. Matisse’s small yet punchy Open Window, Collioure (1905) captures the movement: Broad brushstrokes and a hypersaturated palette of unmixed pigments work in spontaneous tandem to create not only the representational open window on canvas, but a view into a new school of artistic thought. Their Mediterranean oeuvre earned them the nickname Les Fauves, or “wild beasts,” and aptly so. “My choice of colors does not rest on any scientific theory; it is based on observation, on feeling, on the experience of my sensibility,” Matisse wrote. In that spirit, chase off the winter doldrums with pieces vibrant enough to be plucked from Derain’s and Matisse’s very canvases—marmalade polos, vert satchels, a timepiece in rich plum. Go ahead, let your outfit shout a little.
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