Montagnes à Collioure

During the summer of 1905, André Derain packed his paints and headed to Collioure, a sleepy fishing village near France's border with Spain. Working side by side with his friend Henri Matisse, he began treating color as something to celebrate rather than to copy. The two egged each other on, squeezing paint straight from the tube and slapping it down in bright, unmixed strokes. When critics saw the results, they mockingly called the artists "les fauves," or "the wild beasts," and the name stuck. This view of the hills around Collioure shows just how untamed their approach could be.

Realism was clearly not the goal here. Purple and blue mountains rise beneath a sky flecked with green and pink, while the trees flicker to life through hundreds of loose, dancing brushstrokes. The colors have almost nothing to do with how the land actually looked, yet the painting hums with Mediterranean warmth and sunlight. Derain seemed less concerned with showing you the place than with sharing the feeling of standing in that summer heat.

Fauvism was a short-lived adventure, fading after just a few years as its painters chased new ideas. Even so, works like this one mark a bold turning point, a moment when color stepped forward as the true subject of a painting. Cheerful and a little rebellious, it reminds us that art does not always need to look real to feel alive.