Even those of us not par­tic­u­lar­ly well-versed in art his­to­ry have heard of a paint­ing style called fau­vism — and prob­a­bly have nev­er con­sid­ered what it has to do with fauve, the French word for a wild beast. In fact, the two have every­thing to do with one anoth­er, at least in the sense of how cer­tain crit­ics regard­ed cer­tain artists in the ear­ly twen­ti­eth cen­tu­ry. One of the most notable of those artists was Hen­ri Matisse, who since the end of the nine­teenth cen­tu­ry had been explor­ing the pos­si­bil­i­ties of his deci­sion to “lean into the dra­mat­ic pow­er of col­or,” as Evan “Nerd­writer” Puschak puts it in the new video above.

It was Matis­se’s uncon­ven­tion­al use of col­or, emo­tion­al­ly pow­er­ful but not strict­ly real­is­tic, that even­tu­al­ly got him labeled a wild beast. Even before that, in his famous 1904 Luxe, Calme et Volup­té, which has its ori­gins in a stay in St. Tropez, you can “feel Matisse forg­ing his own path. His col­ors are rebelling against their sub­jects. The paint­ing is anar­chic, fan­tas­ti­cal. It’s puls­ing with wild ener­gy.” He con­tin­ued this work on a trip to the south­ern fish­ing vil­lage of Col­lioure, “and even after more than a cen­tu­ry, the paint­ings that result­ed “still retain their defi­ant pow­er; the col­ors still sing with the dar­ing, the cre­ative reck­less­ness of that sum­mer.”

In essence, what shocked about Matisse and the oth­er fau­vists’ art was its sub­sti­tu­tion of objec­tiv­i­ty with sub­jec­tiv­i­ty, most notice­ably in its col­ors, but in sub­tler ele­ments as well. As the years went on — with sup­port com­ing from not the estab­lish­ment but far-sight­ed col­lec­tors — Matisse “learned how to use col­or to define form itself,” cre­at­ing paint­ings that “expressed deep, pri­mal feel­ings and rhythms.”  This evo­lu­tion cul­mi­nat­ed in La Danse, whose “shock­ing scar­let” used to ren­der “naked, danc­ing, leap­ing, spin­ning fig­ures who are less like peo­ple than mytho­log­i­cal satyrs” drew harsh­er oppro­bri­um than any­thing he’d shown before.

But then, “you can’t expect the instan­ta­neous accep­tance of some­thing rad­i­cal­ly new. If it was accept­ed, it would­n’t be rad­i­cal.” Today, “know­ing the direc­tions that mod­ern art went in, we now can appre­ci­ate the full sig­nif­i­cance of Matis­se’s work. We can be shocked at it with­out being scan­dal­ized.” And we can rec­og­nize that he dis­cov­ered a uni­ver­sal­ly res­o­nant aes­thet­ic that most of his con­tem­po­raries did­n’t under­stand —  or at least it seems that way to me, more than a cen­tu­ry lat­er and on the oth­er side of the world, where his art now enjoys such a wide appeal that it adorns the iced-cof­fee bot­tles at con­ve­nience stores.

Relat­ed con­tent:

Hen­ri Matisse Illus­trates Baudelaire’s Cen­sored Poet­ry Col­lec­tion, Les Fleurs du Mal

Hear Gertrude Stein Read Works Inspired by Matisse, Picas­so, and T.S. Eliot (1934)

Hen­ri Matisse Illus­trates James Joyce’s Ulysses (1935)

Why Georges Seurat’s Pointil­list Paint­ing A Sun­day After­noon on the Island of La Grande Jat­te Is a Mas­ter­piece

When Hen­ri Matisse Was 83 Years Old, He Couldn’t Go to His Favorite Swim­ming Pool, So He Cre­at­ed a Swim­ming Pool as a Work of Art

Watch Icon­ic Artists at Work: Rare Videos of Picas­so, Matisse, Kandin­sky, Renoir, Mon­et, Pol­lock & More

Based in Seoul, Col­in Marshall writes and broad­casts on cities, lan­guage, and cul­ture. His projects include the Sub­stack newslet­ter Books on Cities and the book The State­less City: a Walk through 21st-Cen­tu­ry Los Ange­les. Fol­low him on Twit­ter at @colinmarshall or on Face­book.