In the summer of 1905, Henri Matisse and André Derain transformed the sleepy French fishing village of Collioure into a crucible of modern art. Matisse was 35 and still reeling from the financial disaster of his first one-man show, exhibited the year before at Ambroise Vollard’s Parisian gallery. Derain, a decade his junior, had only recently quit a career in engineering to pursue art full-time.
Under the dazzling Mediterranean sun, the pair spurred each other on, pushing their painting to its limits: perspective was abandoned, systematically applied daubs of paint evolved into free-flowing swirls and slabs of spontaneous brushwork, and colors exploded into a palette of complementary tones dictated by emotion rather than representation. Derain likened it to igniting a stick of dynamite under their work.
