o oppose the meaningless banality of the official and semi-official Salons" (Hamilton 159). At the 1905 exhibition Matisse's Woman with a Hat (a portrait of his wife) was a sensation and he became famous at the age of 36. This unusual painting featured broad areas of vibrant color that had little resemblance to the colors of things as seen in nature. In the painting Madame Matisse sits in a conventional pose and wears a very large decorated hat. But Matisse used "deliberate disharmonies . . . of red, green, orange, purple, and blue"--with no modeling of the subject except in the face where form "is created inversely by green, the complementary of flesh tones (Hamilton 161). The drawing and brushwork are very rough, but every color has its place in the carefully balanced whole. In this work Matisse had finally "developed a radical new approach to color, using it in a structural rather than a descriptive way ("Matisse"). This and other works, and the paintings of his followers, outraged the art critics and they called the group the Fauves (Wild beasts).
By 1907 Matisse ended his association with the other Fauves and was never again a part of any school or movement because he believed "an artist should not allow himself to become a pr
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