by Sue Roe
The people of the town were volatile. In the streets, there were yells; insults were hurled, cutlasses brandished. Shutters were fastened ajar; combats were discreetly witnessed. The perfume of Collioure was salt, fish and detritus as the women came out to empty the night’s waste into the sea and the rocks swarmed with hundreds of spider crabs. Then the village cats came out, mangy, lean, their threadbare coats striped with livid scars, to fight over the pickings. By the time the catch was in, the women were already seated on the beach, deftly mending the nets. Within minutes, the beaches would be covered with a carpet of shining fish scales. The decks, the sides of the boats, the hands of the men, shone with silver until, at first light, with the first breeze, the scales were dispersed along the lanes like confetti. There would be no rest for those housed within yards of all this dawn activity, as Matisse now was. The quiet time was the couple of hours following midday, when the men rested after their morning’s work. Then, the village fell silent. On the beaches, suddenly empty, there remained only the chains, hooks, ropes and crossbars, which the old people tidied up and put to rights. While the menfolk took their siesta, the old women did their knitting in the shade and kept watch, and the younger women gathered around the wells to catch up on the day’s gossip and news.
Matisse went down to the beaches and made pen and ink sketches of the women mending the nets, the fishermen rolling them and the boats on the shoreline, their sails down, a row of masts in the foreground, and in the background the castle, church or bell tower. He drew boats, sails flapping, scudding along, with others just coming in, little figures in the foreground and the line of men throwing their weight behind the crossbar. With Amélie, he walked up into the hills and sketched the mountains rising up against the sea. They left early in the mornings and walked right away from the town, seeking secluded spots where he could paint her without fear of attracting curious onlookers. She modelled for unclothed Arcadian nymphs and sat for a work which became The Green Line, a semi-abstract portrait in orange and violet, turquoise, green and red, in which her hair is a mass of blue-black, her face bisected by a broad green stripe. That summer, the heat made the water calm. On a still day, the sky threw dappled, silvery reflections on to the surface of the sea. In Matisse’s sketches, boats wait, moored on the beach, the low waves behind them; sailors, or a little dog, stroll along; a few rapidly drawn circles indicate the pebbles on the shingled shoreline.
After a while, however, Matisse began to crave the company of other artists. Despite his difficulties with Signac, he had appreciated the stimulation he and his neighbours had provided in St Tropez. From Collioure, he wrote to a number of his friends inviting them to join him, but received only one reply, from André Derain, released from the army since September, who immediately accepted, making plans to arrive in the port in the last week of May or the first week of June. The neighbours of la dame Roussette included a local fruit and vegetable seller, old Mathieu Muxart, who had lived in the place for decades. He happened to be at the Hôtel de la Gare to witness the arrival at the station of the extraordinary ‘Monsieur André’.
Tall, lanky, dressed entirely in white but with a red beret, when he stepped down from the train Derain caused consternation. Mathieu saw appearing at the door of the Hôtel de la Gare ‘a sort of giant … with a long, thin moustache, and the eyes of a cat’. Derain took off his beret, announced he was a friend of Matisse and asked to be shown to the hotel foyer. La dame Roussette immediately ordered Mathieu to put him out into the street: ‘Poor me! He’d have made … five of me.’ He was dressed like a carnival, she protested, as Derain looked on, bewildered. Mathieu suggested that, were he to throw the gentleman out, Monsieur Matisse might be sorely offended. So Derain, too, came to lodge at the Hôtel de la Gare. The next day, Mathieu was sent up to the station to fetch his luggage. There, waiting at the station, was a little handcart bursting with boxes and trunks and a huge umbrella.
The searing heat continued, and the extraordinary light it created captured the young painter’s imagination from the moment he arrived. In a letter home to Vlaminck, Matisse described the ‘blonde, gilded light, which suppresses the shadows … it’s a revelation, a work of art; amazing …’ Where Matisse had envisaged opportunities for developing the new divisionist techniques he had begun to experiment with since meeting Signac, what struck Derain was the flattening effect on colour created by the strong light of the region. The strong sunlight bronzed the people chrome and created stark contrasts between the dark blue of the sea, the burnt-orange hillsides and the terracotta rooftops, highlighting the varied colours of the boats on the water and rendering the sails a scintillating white.
Derain got to work straight away, undeterred by the heat, painting the lanes, the local people, the sea, the boats in the harbour or on the water. (Today, his Fishing Boats, Collioure hangs in the Metropolitan Museum of Art, as does his vivid, somewhat wild-looking portrait of Vlaminck.) He observed with fascination the men with blue-black beards, the women with their lovely, graceful gestures and traditional costumes with black camisoles; he loved the donkeys, the multicoloured boats, even the local pottery painted bright red and green. Exploring the area, he found churches with wooden sculptures he thought would make Vlaminck turn pale, architecture in unusual colours and lanes winding up from the port, where he listened to a Spanish beggar singing gypsy songs. He began to paint broad expanses of dark water shimmering with dappled silver light, lines of pure yellow depicting light glancing across the boats. From the top of the town, looking down on the church, he observed a row of orange rooftops, the hills, in the background, burned, dark russet and orange, a scene he depicted in numerous paintings, in which, between the line of the sloping rooftops and the flat planes of orange hillside, a freely painted sweep of indigo blue indicates the sea, creating the impression of pure, hot, flat colour. Derain produced paintings apparently without effort. In his Bateaux à Collioure, seen from the second floor of the Café Olo, the bay is a flutter of blue and yellow marks, highlighted by a few touches of pure, bold red – the same red he used in Le Séchage des voiles, the final painting he did in Collioure at the end of that summer. The light provided such stark contrasts that he depicted it in broad, scarlet lines scoring the beach, the little figures going about their business shown in green and yellow.
In his first summer following his release from three years’ military service, Derain revelled in the freedom of life in Collioure, excited by everything he saw but, mainly, as he wrote to Vlaminck, bowled over by the effect of the light and its potential to transform his work. At twenty-five, free of responsibility, he was living out his own version of Arcadia. Like Matisse, he had experimented with divisionism; unlike Matisse, he now shed his own divisionist methods as easily as he threw himself from the rocks into the refreshing sea.
As the summer wore on, the heat seemed to intensify. The two painters worked incessantly, from morning until night, before Collioure’s vivid motifs. They painted more or less the same locations, though never from the same angle; only four or five of their works were evidently painted at the same time. After being in the same place for two months, they still met on occasion, but sought different locations, wanting to be alone to work. Derain became increasingly more fugitive, combative and determined as he painted a greater number of canvases, and on a grander scale, than Matisse. The pictures he painted on arrival – still pointillist – may be clearly distinguished from those he did at the end of the summer, painted in broad, flat bands of pure colour. By the end of the summer, he had completely abandoned divisionism for the magnificent works with flattened surfaces in bold, sparkling colours he brought back from Collioure. Things were not at all the same for Matisse, who moved towards and away from pointillism throughout the summer, even in works such as La Plage rouge, in which the foreground is a vivid sweep of scarlet; when he arrived back in Paris in the autumn, he would still be painting his final divisionist works.
In the Hôtel de la Gare, Derain hung his paintings on the walls
and sat smoking his pipe and contemplating his work, creating a perturbing spectacle. La dame Roussette was still sceptical. His work was no less alarming than the man himself. ‘But what can he possibly see in them?’ she asked Mathieu, who scrutinized them carefully. ‘Well, they’re better than the pictures in the calendar.’ When Derain painted a sign for the hotel, it looked to Mathieu like a brightly coloured firework with the words ‘Hôtel de la Gare’ written over the top. For la dame Roussette it was a step too far. She threw it into the courtyard, where Mathieu rescued it and placed it discreetly on top of the rabbit cage so that Monsieur Derain would not find it in the ditch. The incident seemed to him disappointing, since until then the hotelier had seemed reconciled to the idea of the strange, lanky gentleman in the red beret, especially since he was very good at entertaining the neighbours. To Matisse, however, Derain was becoming an ever more irritating presence. When they went down in the morning to watch the fishermen bring up their catch, Derain, at the front of the crowd, stood tall and unself-conscious, scribbling energetically in his sketchbook, confident of his place among them. Matisse, demure in his city suit and bowler hat, stood awkwardly at the back, as if wishing to pass unnoticed, not observing, not sketching, apparently impassive, as if the two of them had nothing to do with each other. In the evenings after dinner, they painted each other’s portraits in the Hôtel de la Gare dining room. Derain’s portrait of Matisse depicts an anguished, startled figure.
At the beginning of July, Matisse and Amélie moved down to the Café Olo, at the port overlooking Boramar beach. From the first-floor apartment of the café in the boulevard Boramar, Matisse could look straight out across the port and paint the boats from his open window; La Fenêtre ouverte and La Plage rouge were both painted from here. Derain remained at the Hôtel de la Gare, but when Paul Soulier, the photographer, offered Matisse a room in his house to use as a studio, Derain came too. To add to his problems, now that they were so close to the port, Matisse was unable to sleep. Amélie was kept up into the early hours, reading aloud in an attempt to settle his nerves. Down at the port in the Boramar cove, Matisse would invariably have been woken at dawn, when the catch came in and the place was suddenly transformed into a clamorous hive of agitation, the beach full of people shouting across to one another as the boats arrived, men jumping on land, lowering baskets heavy with fish, pressing forward to start auctioning their haul or releasing the great, heavy nets which snaked up from the depths of the boat, coiling them into the stretchers they shouldered up the beach, two by two, before unrolling them and laying them out to dry.
Collioure’s motto was ‘La Joie de vivre’, ‘the joy of life’. Matisse went to the most secluded beach, farthest from the port, to paint the work he named after this motto. In it, he was still working with the divisionist methods of Luxe, calme et volupté. Using an Italian model (sent down from Paris) for all the figures, he painted nude nymphs dancing with abandon in this small, glittering Arcadia, developing them into mythological, imaginary creatures. The composition and the figures owe something to his cherished possession, Cézanne’s Three Bathers, though in ‘La Joie de vivre’ there are seven figures, and Matisse’s Arcadia, unlike Cézanne’s, was clearly imaginary.
Before he left Collioure, Matisse had hoped to pull together all the ideas he had accumulated in sketches, drawings and watercolours into one definitive work that he could send to the Salon d’Automne. He was still painting in a mixture of divisionism and the ‘flat’ treatment of colour he and Derain had both discovered in Collioure, moving back and forth between Signac’s methods and the method of ‘la couleur pour la couleur’ which he and Derain were now progressing towards, albeit in their different ways. The discovery of a new method involved emotional complexity and daring, which, for Derain that summer, seemed to pose few problems. For Matisse, matters were more complicated. His commitment to Signac was important from every point of view and the break with divisionism represented risk and uncertainty at a time when, after years of strain, he was searching for stability, not yet more stress.
By the end of July, the rains came. Suddenly, the light dramatically dimmed; the scintillating colours faded to pale blues, pinks and greys and the deluge teemed down. Derain was confined to the Hôtel de la Gare. By the time the rain arrived, it was a relief: the demands of the unremitting heat and light had finally begun to take their toll on him too. On 28 July, he wrote wittily to Vlaminck, ‘I’m taking advantage of the rain to write to you, as usually the light is so strong that I despair at the way it increases my synthetic difficulties and my acrobatic exercises on the subject of Light.’ He considered he had gained two major insights in Collioure, firstly ‘a new conception of light, which consists of … the negation of shadow’; he had noticed that when sunlight is very strong, shadows are not darker but, on the contrary, very pale. That observation had made him think about shadow – a whole world of luminosity shielded by the brightness of the sun, which lengthens shadow and converts it into reflections. Secondly, he now understood that, in a luminous, harmonious panel, the juxtaposition of clarity and luminosity was logical, though that way of seeing failed to take account of things that took their expression from internal harmonies, a style of depiction which destroyed itself from within if pushed to the limit. He realized that sunlight, in other words, naturally ‘deforms’ what we see, so light cannot truly be seen as a material element produced by the act of painting, a flash of colour shot – as it were – by a projector (the cannon shots of the Fauves), but rather as a medium which itself determines the dimensions of contrasting surfaces and the rhythm of their proportions. It was not, he now saw, a question of ‘lighting’ the contents of a picture but of making the light emanate from them. Though aesthetically revealing, in some respects these observations seemed so challenging as to be merely dispiriting. After the excitement, turbulence and tensions of the summer, he was tired, and thirsty for life, and for Paris – the courtesans, the mots d’esprit, the repartee – which seemed ridiculous, since in the past he had had no time for any of that.
Old Mathieu Muxart had noticed a change in Derain since Matisse had left the hotel. He no longer laughed; he seemed sad. In letters to Vlaminck, he confided his ennui: ‘I’m fed up, but not really about anything.’ He was annoyed with himself for still feeling unsettled. ‘I am just a stupid artist, lawless, outside the rim, not really in the world, a hybrid. I find myself looking back on that soldier I was last year, his feet firmly on the ground.’ He felt he had exhausted the possibilities of Collioure, his morale was hardly improving and he was counting on the winter to clear his head. He was beginning to wonder if he and Vlaminck had anything in common with other men; he just wanted to get back to Paris and on with his work – his loneliness was beginning to get on his nerves. With the contrariness of youth, he sometimes even found himself longing for a house in the country, a wife, children, dogs; ‘oh, to never have to go back to Paris for exhibitions’.
At the time, Vlaminck felt the same. For the past two years, he had been living on the pittance he earned from giving violin lessons in Le Vésinet, where his grandmother, a fruit and vegetable seller who had a stall in Les Halles, owned the family home. The job he had enjoyed, playing in the orchestra of the Théâtre du Château d’Eau, had come to an end two years earlier when, in 1903, the theatre had closed down. The closure had been announced on a beautiful day, and he had decided to devote his life to painting, despite the resultant ‘pecuniary embarrassments’; ‘I had had quite enough of Paris and of its scenes which were so far removed from my own personal preoccupations’, and quite enough, too, of walking home to Chatou in the early hours, unable to afford the train fare. When he did return to the city, he used to stroll among the rag-pickers’ shacks around the Fort Mont-Valérien, where, as in the Maquis, a shanty town had sprung up around areas of waste ground and quarries which were the result of abandoned construction works, enlivened, for the time being, with poor families whose coloured washing, hung out on trellises to dry, he found strang
ely soothing.
Derain was planning to return on 1 September with a substantial portfolio of work. He had thirty completed canvases, twenty drawings and about fifteen sketches and was happy with the quantity, he told Vlaminck in his letters, but not the quality. He was preparing a large painting for his return, though he was not, he assured Vlaminck, even thinking of the Salon d’Automne. He had made around thirty studies for it; he had never before produced such a complicated work, quite different from anything he had done before; nor had he ever been quite so sure of disconcerting the critics. Meanwhile, he was enjoying his last few weeks in Collioure driving around la Catalogne ‘en automobile’ (most likely a makeshift peasant’s cart).
During the first few days of August, it went on raining hard, a salamandas, declared Mathieu, a tempest in midsummer he would remember all his life. A terrific gust of wind came in from the south, uprooting trees, tearing off leaves, stripping the branches as in winter. Windowpanes shook with the force of the gusts. The storm went on all night and throughout the morning of 5 August. La dame Roussette began to feel sorry for her lonely lodger, stranded indoors. To cheer him up, she allowed him to paint one of the inner doors of the hotel. She stood watching as he painted the centre of the door with a colourful scene depicting the torso of Don Quixote mounted on Rocinante, adding the bust of Sancho Panza in the right-hand-bottom corner in yellow, purple and green: ‘A yellow moon in a green sky! … Nobody had ever seen that before! Wherever does he get these ideas, Monsieur André? Did he ever make us laugh!’ Eventually, on 24 August, Derain packed all his boxes, put on his smart red beret, picked up his umbrella and left Collioure. Matisse never worked with him again.