緑の筋

Matisse painted his wife Amélie in 1905, and the thing everyone notices is the band of green. It runs straight down the centre of her face, from hairline to chin, splitting it into a warm side of reds and oranges and a cool side of green and blue. There is no green stripe on any real face. Matisse is using colour as if it were the shadow and light a face is modelled with, only frankly, as pure paint. That autumn he and a few friends hung work like this together in Paris and a critic called them les fauves, the wild beasts, and the name stuck to the whole movement. Not everyone was charmed. One acquaintance of the buyers called it a demented caricature of a portrait. Amélie's hair is a flat wedge of black, and her collar and the background are three separate slabs of colour that refuse to agree.