Feeling first: What Ms. Matisse and the Fauves taught me about seeing

What color refuses to stay quiet?

There’s a portrait I always return to at the sfmoma. The woman in it is calm, but the colors around her are anything but. A single, assertive line of green divides her face. At first, it looks like a mistake. But the longer you stand with her, the more it feels like something honest — as if color has stepped forward, refusing to wait its turn.

Matisse's portrait of his wife, a turning point in color's role in painting.

The Fauves and the shock of 1905

When this portrait appeared at the 1905 Salon d’Automne in Paris, it didn’t quietly enter the conversation. It ignited it. Critics were stunned by the work in Room VII: paintings full of emotion, saturated in unnatural color, and unconcerned with convention. Louis Vauxcelles, trying to make sense of the chaos, coined the phrase "Donatello chez les fauves" — Donatello among the wild beasts — referencing the uneasy contrast between a classical sculpture and what he called an "orgy of pure tones" erupting around it.

The name stuck. The Fauves — Matisse, Derain, Vlaminck, and others — were no longer bound to representation. They painted what they felt, not just what they saw.

Some responses were brutal. Camille Mauclair wrote, "A pot of paint has been flung in the face of the public." Among the paintings targeted was Matisse's Woman with a Hat, its vivid palette deemed garish and absurd. But not everyone turned away. Gertrude and Leo Stein purchased the piece, a gesture of belief that came at exactly the right time. Matisse, disheartened by the backlash, found in their support the encouragement to keep going.

An anemone, one of Matisse's favored flowers — delicate, vivid, emotionally resonant.

Letting color lead

I go back to see this painting monthly. Not to memorize it, but to keep listening to what it says.

I’ve been thinking about that painting again — not to imitate it, but to understand its language. I pulled out three of the colors he used: viridian for its clear, uncompromising green; alizarin crimson for its emotional depth; ultramarine blue for its quiet grounding.

I work with modern, lightfast pigments — versions that hold their color over time, even in watercolor. Alizarin crimson, for instance, was originally known to fade. The contemporary formulation I use is permanent, but still carries that same emotional charge. These pigments carry weight. They don’t blend easily. They resist softness. And that resistance became part of the process.

Modern equivalents of Matisse's palette, laid out and ready to speak.

Returning to the anemone

I chose the anemone — a flower Matisse returned to often — as a way to test these colors again. Not through portraiture, but through shape, saturation, and silence. Painting it wasn’t about creating harmony. It was about letting the colors speak to one another. Sometimes they clashed. Sometimes they surprised me. I didn’t resolve every tension. I let some of them stay.

The early tension of color meeting paper: unresolved and full of direction.

The colors are still speaking

What made that painting feel scandalous a century ago now feels like invitation. The Fauves weren’t just trying to disrupt — they were opening the door to a new kind of seeing. A seeing that didn’t ask color to behave. When I look back at that portrait now, the green doesn’t feel shocking. It feels clear. True. A kind of certainty I didn’t know I needed.

A piece made from questions

This final piece holds more than color. It holds a conversation — with Matisse, with the Fauves, with the long line of artists who let feeling lead. It’s not a reproduction. It’s a reflection. Of how color behaves when it’s given freedom. Of how form softens when emotion steps forward. Of how meaning shifts when you stop trying to control it.

The completed piece, where the colors carry the voice of the painting.

And maybe that’s the quiet question at the heart of it all:

When you change… what changes in what you see?