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• The Open Window

• Henri Matisse

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• Nice in 1918
  Painted in Nice circa 1918
  Oil on cradled panel
  
  Painted in 1918, Matisse’s La fenêtre ouverte represents a paradisiacal beach in Nice. The coastal landscape is framed by a window, which has been thrust open to let in the sunlight and fresh sea air. The painting is characterized by its brilliant luminosity and creamy color palette: the promenade along the beach is pale pink, with gradients of mauve purple and sky blue in the sea beyond, creating the illusion of shimmering light dancing on the surface of the water. That radiant pink-purple-blue color palette is interrupted only by the black silhouettes of strollers on the promenade, as well as the bright green fronds of a palm tree, the top of which is just visible above the window sill.
  
  Matisse visited Nice for the first time in December 1917, near the conclusion of the First World War. The artist took a room in the H?tel Beau Rivage overlooking the Promenade des Anglais: a pedestrian walkway along the Mediterranean Sea that is lined with palm trees. In April 1918, Matisse rented a studio space next to the H?tel, which offered a similar view; this is likely the perspective depicted in La fenêtre ouverte. Though initially discouraged by the gloomy weather in the winter of 1917-1918, Matisse soon became enamored by the idyllic views and exquisite light of the French Riviera. He later recalled, “When I realized that every morning I would see this light again, I could not describe my joy. I decided not to leave Nice, and I stayed there practically all my life” (écrits et propos sur l’art, Paris, 1971, p. 123).
  
  Matisse employed the same compositional device of an open window in several earlier paintings. The Fauvist icon, La fenêtre ouverte, Collioure (1905, National Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C.), for example, pictures sailboats through a window fringed with green ivy and lined with flower pots. For Matisse, the recurring motif of the open window served as a visual metaphor for painting itself: just as one can see the world through a window, so too does the canvas offer a fictive, two-dimensional “window” into a world imagined by the artist.
  
  In Matisse’s work, the window also endows his paintings with spatial complexity: he simultaneously depicted the outside landscape as well as the inside space where the artist and the viewer are situated. As Shirley Neilsen Blum has noted: “Instead of suggesting escape, Matisse's windows look out on subjects that speak to the beauty of creation…Although they repeatedly join two worlds, those of man and nature, Matisse insisted that the interior and the exterior—the room and its view—made up a single unified whole. Rather than an enticement to the outer world, the windows return the viewer to the interior scene, a process sometimes aided by a figure that unexpectedly looks towards the viewer as opposed to outward to the view. Such windows enrich the mood and moderate the static confinement implicit in a closed room” (Henri Matisse: Rooms with a View, London, 2010, p. 13).
  
  La fenêtre ouverte, which postdates the National Gallery’s La fenêtre ouverte, Collioure by thirteen years, is perhaps less radical in its color palette. The 1905 Fauvist canvas deviates significantly from reality: the walls range from turquoise to lavender, the window is both fuchsia and salmon pink. The colors in the 1918 picture may be more naturalistic, but they are just as vivid and are applied with even greater confidence, with fluid, luscious brushstrokes. Furthermore, the elements of the present landscape—sky, sea, promenade and the window ledge—are simplified, organized into blunt horizontal bands. In this sense, this painting seems to anticipate the color field paintings of American Abstract Expressionists, such as Mark Rothko and Richard Diebenkorn, in the second half of the twentieth century. Color was indeed the primary impetus for Matisse’s work throughout his career; as the artist wrote in his famous essay, “Notes of a Painter”: “My choice of colors is based on observation, on sensitivity, on felt experiences…I simply try to put down colors which render my sensation” (quoted in C. Harrison and P. Wood, eds., Art in Theory: 1900-2000, London, 2003, pp. 70-71).
  
  This painting belonged to the artist’s estate upon his death in 1954. Four years later, Jerome K. Ohrbach, the owner of the successful line of eponymous clothing stores, acquired the work via Sam Salz, Inc., New York. Ohrbach’s entire art collection, including the present work, was sold at auction after his death in 1990. The late owner acquired La fenêtre ouverte at that sale and has owned it ever since.

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Other paintings by Henri Matisse:

Luxembourg Gardens, Paris

Nude Crouching Near an Aquarium (Nude with Goldfish)

Landscape with Cypresses and Olive Trees around Nice

Odalisque Lying with Magnolias