Learn How 20th-Century Fauvism Came To Be In This Exhibition

Photo: André Derain, Woman with a Shawl, Madame Matisse in a Kimono, 1905, Oil on Canvas, Private Collection, Courtesy Nevill Keating Pictures, London. © 2023 Artists Rights Society, New York / ADAGP, Paris.

On view at The Museum of Fine Arts, Houston through May 27, “Vertigo of Color: Matisse, Derain, and the Origins of Fauvism” is a collaboration between the MFAH and the Metropolitan Museum of Art. The exhibition presents 65 paintings, drawings and watercolors by Henri Matisse and André Derain on loan from national and international museums and private collections.

For the first time in the U.S., this show focuses on the two French artists’ historic collaboration during the summer of 1905. Their resulting works planted the seed for Fauvism in the early 20th century. “The work that they created liberated color from its traditional role, radically changing modernist painting,” says Gary Tinterow, director and Margaret Alkek Williams chair at the MFAH.