View of Collioure by Henri Matisse

Henri Matisse painted View of Collioure in 1907, during the years his intense colorism earned him and his fellow Fauves the label 'wild beasts.' The canvas shows the southern French coastal town not as a postcard but as a set of chromatic relationships, glimpsed through a screen of near-black tree trunks. It belongs today to the collection of the Hermitage Museum in Saint Petersburg.

Stand back from the painting and the eye goes straight to the gap between the dark trunks. That narrow opening is where nearly all the color information lives: the white bell tower of Notre-Dame-des-Anges, the orange terracotta rooftops, and a thin strip of Mediterranean blue. Matisse flattens the foliage above into solid planes of green with no gradation and no shadow, and he nearly refuses the sky entirely, only a sliver at the upper right corner.

Collioure was a fishing village on the Vermilion Coast that drew Matisse and André Derain in the summer of 1905, and it became the laboratory for Fauvism. By 1907 Matisse was absorbing lessons from Cézanne, the tilted ground plane and loose directional strokes at the base of this picture owe a direct debt to the elder painter's construction of space. The trunks themselves are built from overlapping brushstrokes that declare themselves as paint rather than hiding behind illusion.

Everything here is a decision about seeing. The trunks block, the colors clash, and the town glows not because it glowed that afternoon, but because Matisse decided it should. What does the painting feel like to you, a window or a wall?