Portrait of Madame Matisse (The Green Stripe)

Matisse paints his wife with a bold green stripe running down the center of her face, dividing it into zones of contrasting color - warm on one side, cool on the other - her features simplified into flat, vivid planes. The arbitrary color, used to model form and mood rather than describe appearance, scandalized viewers. Now in Copenhagen, the Green Stripe is a landmark of Fauvism - a portrait in which color itself does the work of light and shadow, the human face boldly reconstructed as a daring, expressive arrangement of pure hue.