An hardly any other place are mountains and sea so close together as in Collioure. The Albères, the foothills of the Pyrenees on the French Mediterranean coast, seem to plunge into the foaming waves with their rugged ridges. In the mornings, shreds of fog usually still surround the forts that were built high up to protect the port and fishing town, which belonged to Catalonia until the Peace of the Pyrenees of 1659, against invaders and pirates. But then the sun breaks through with such force that Collioure is transformed into a single Mediterranean color palette. The water, on which the traditional Catalan fishing boats are bobbing, shimmers inky blue. The colorful facades and shutters of the narrow houses on the cobbled streets shine in apricot orange, mauve violet, sunflower yellow and olive green. The cap-shaped dome of the church tower of Notre-Dame-des-Anges, which also served as a lighthouse, towers above the bright red tiled roofs in a soft pink.
Don’t color shapes, shape colors
When Henri Matisse first came to Collioure in 1905 and rented Madame Rosette’s boarding house, he was mesmerized by the play of colors of the place and the Côte Vermeille, the purple coast that stretches south from Perpignan to the Spanish border. From his childhood and youth in northern France he was more familiar with the gray of the slag heaps and the black of the factory smoke. Until then, he had painted in the light, diffuse tones of Impressionism, but now he let the colors pop in pure form over large areas. “Painting does not mean coloring forms, but forming colors,” he outlined his new impetuous technique. In order to have a better view of what was going on in the port, he set up his studio on the second floor of a house on the Plage Port d’Avall. From the outside you can still see the window with the green shutters and the iron balustrade, which gave the name to one of the artist’s most famous oil paintings: “La fenêtre ouverte à Collioure” shows the open window through which you can see the window sill with flower pots and further away the harbor with ships, all radiant in almost psychedelic colors.
Outpost of Catalonia on the Provence coast: the Royal Castle of Collioure.
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Bild: Picture Alliance
Matisse encouraged like-minded artist friends such as André Derain, Maurice de Vlaminck, Kees van Dongen and Raoul Dufy to also come to Collioure to indulge in the frenzy of colour. Derain was delighted: “First of all, there is this light – a blond, gold-tinged light that erases every shadow. A confusing work has begun for me, because everything I have painted so far seems limited to me.” But the first creations of the colorists, who were infatuated with the play of colors of the Côte Vermeille, caused a shake of the head at the autumn salon of 1905 in Paris. It was the inferior works of “fauves”, predators, etched a discredited art critic. Despite all the abuse, the new style of art, which came to be known as Fauvism, quickly made a name for itself, although it was short-lived and only lasted until the beginning of the First World War.