Flowers (Fleurs)

1906

This canvas was painted one year after a critic reviewing the Salon d’Automne exhibition in Paris used the term Fauves (meaning “wild beasts”) to describe similar paintings by Henri Matisse, in which bold brushwork and vivid, nonrealistic color denied any conventional perception of depth. Here, variable patches, strokes, and smudges of unblended paint, along with areas of unpainted canvas, render empty space and solid objects alike. For Matisse, such still lifes were a vehicle for exploring color, as he noted: “Construction by colored surfaces. Search for intensity of color, subject matter being unimportant. . . . Light . . . expressed by a harmony of intensely colored surfaces.”