Nobody less like a "wild beast" than the meditative Matisse could be imagined. But the paintings he produced in the summer, at the Mediterranean port of Collioure, were certainly unbridled. The quay-side becomes blood-red, and even inside his studio the doors opening out of the boat-bristling harbour burn with impetuously applied strokes of orange and scarlet.
Although Matisse's mood was ecstatic, he remained judicious enough to ensure that his art never became merely strident. Walking through the cool white rooms of the Pompidou's spaciously hung survey, I soon began to realise that he had achieved an astonishing fusion of the headlong and the sparing, the rapturous and the analytical. Derain, whose moustachioed face he painted with the aid of violent blue and green shadows, was brash compared with Matisse. At once discerning and hot-headed, he arrived during these years at a marvellously sustained union of the Apollonian and the Dionysiac. His 1906 masterpiece Joy of Life remains at the Barnes Foundation in Philadelphia, unavailable for loan, but other key canvases have been borrowed from major collections in St Petersburg, Moscow, New York and Copenhagen to show Matisse's flowering at full strength.
Picasso, with whom he exchanged paintings in 1907, must have acted as an additional spur. For the Spaniard was working on Les Demoiselles d'Avignon at the time. These were the years when 20th-century art defined its most radical identity. And as if in response to Picasso's challenge, Matisse embarked in 1908 on an annus mirabilis of his own.
The year commenced with a burnished Nude in Black and Gold, as darkly sensual as Gauguin but bounded by thick contours handled with a new roughness. Making sculpture helped him to give this figure greater solidity, and in a strange painting of naked bathers staring at a turtle Matisse gave their forms a statuesque presence. But he was equally bent on pursuing flatness of surface, in order to emancipate colour still more fully.
