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• Collioure in August

• Henri Matisse

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• Painted in Collioure circa 1911
  Oil on canvas
  35 1/8 x 45 7/8 in. (89 x 116.5 cm.)
  Private collection.
  
  Henri Matisse’s Collioure en ao?t depicts the Mediterranean fishing village of Collioure in the golden heat of August. The painting represents an oblique perspective of a gently sloping, sandy-colored hill, dotted with the red brick roofs and green olive trees, leading down to the azure bay of Ansa de la Baleta. Painted loosely but on a monumental scale, this Fauvist-era landscape has a prestigious provenance that links major collectors of modern art in Paris and New York, and has been featured in several important exhibitions, from the 1911 Salon d’Automne in Paris to the 1992 Matisse retrospective at The Museum of Modern Art in New York.
  
  As the Impressionists had before him, Matisse often sketched and painted en plein air, working to capture the essential topography of a landscape as well as the intense coloristic sensations it provoked in him. Freely-painted works such as Collioure en ao?t suggest a creative urgency and spontaneity—as if the paint flowed freely, like polychromatic lava, from his soul to his brush. Yet Matisse’s paintings were in fact much more carefully conceived than the final products might suggest. In the words of Georges Salles, the Fauvist painter methodically “translated light and space into equivalent hues”—calculating the sums of color and form within the overall equation of the composition (“Visit to Matisse,” Art News 21, 1952, p. 38).
  
  Matisse painted Collioure en ao?t circa 1911. He spent July through late September of that year in the charming seaside town. After this brief sojourn, the artist returned to Paris in anticipation of the Salon d’Automne that opened the following month. There, the present canvas was displayed under the title of Paysage esquisse décorative. This exhibition was staged six years after the explosive Salon d’Automne of 1905, at which Matisse and André Derain debuted a new radical painting style; the moniker “fauvist” was first coined there. In the intervening six years, Matisse had developed an even more rigorous formal approach that incorporated “highly patterned rectilinear planes, clear color contrasts, and a disjunctively flattened space,” which “could almost have been put together from pieces of cloth or paper” (J. Flam, Matisse: The Man and His Art, 1869-1918, Ithaca and London, 1986, p. 314). In this sense, Matisse also seems to have anticipated the cubist collages of Matisse’s contemporaries, Pablo Picasso and Georges Braque—and Matisse’s own exploration of paper cut-outs much later in his career. This novel, constructivist approach distinguishes Collioure en ao?t from Matisse’s earlier, more painterly landscapes, such as La mer vue de Collioure (1906, Barnes Foundation, Philadelphia) or Vue de Collioure (1907, The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York).
  
  A month after the conclusion of the Salon d’Automne in November 1911, this painting was acquired from the artist by Galerie Bernheim-Jeune et Cie., Paris. By 1923, Collioure en ao?t had entered the collection of Paul Poiret, the visionary haute couture fashion designer who created some of the most innovative modern dress silhouettes of the early twentieth century. Poiret socialized with and collected the work of some the most important avant-garde artists of his day: Constantin Brancusi, Derain, Amedeo Modigliani, Picasso, as well as Matisse. In 1923, highlights from Poiret’s collection, including the present work, were exhibited to the public at the Galerie Barbazanges in Paris. This gallery, which operated between 1911 and 1928, was situated at 109 rue Faubourg Saint-Honoré in the 8th arrondissement of Paris—an h?tel owned by Poiret and the site of his eponymous fashion house. Poiret sold Collioure en ao?t at auction in 1925, just a few years before he was forced to close his own label due to mounting debts.
  
  By 1951, Collioure en ao?t had been acquired by Georges Salles, a French art historian, curator of Asian art at the Musée du Louvre, and later the director of the Musées de France. Like Poiret, Salles was a friend and patron of several major twentieth-century painters, including Matisse. In 1952, for example, Salles published his personal impressions of a visit to Matisse’s studio, which he described as a “a fantastic laboratory of visual alchemy” (op. cit., 1952, p. 37). After Salles’s death in 1966, the painting passed to his descendants; it was later purchased by the New York financier and philanthropist Donald B. and his wife, Catie Marron, who lent the work to the 1992-1993 Matisse retrospective at The Museum of Modern Art, New York. For the past twenty years Collioure en ao?t has belonged in the same private collection.

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Other paintings by Henri Matisse:

Nymph and Red Fauna

Bouquet, Chinese Vase

Still Life with Purro, I

Mademoiselle Matisse in a Plaid Coat