粉红色的墙

Early in 1898 Matisse, newly married, took his wife south to Corsica, the first time he had really seen Mediterranean light. He was still a fairly conventional painter, but six months in Ajaccio changed that. He turned out around 55 small canvases chasing the orange and blue he found there, and later called it the place where he discovered the South. This is one of them, the sunlit pink wall of a hospital in the town, painted for the pleasure of the color more than the subject, the wall a flat warm slab against the greenery. The blazing reds and greens that would later make him notorious were still a few years off.