“The Fauve Landscape,” currently at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, presents a murky, soft-focus view of a bright, clear moment in the history of modern art¹. Judi Freeman, who organized the show for the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, has taken what she calls a “site-specific” approach to her subject. This means that she has grouped paintings by Matisse, Derain, Vlaminck, Dufy, Marquet, Braque, anfd a number of other artists in terms of the locales that they depict—and where, as these are for the most part paintings done directly from nature, they were done. At the Met this results in a series of galleries with captions posted high on the walls that read “Paris,” “Suburbs of Paris,” “St. Tropez,” “Collioure,” “Normandy,” and so forth. It’s a sort of meandering tour of places where bohemian artists lived or visited in the period 1904-08. It’s the if-this-is-summer-1905-this-must-be-Matisse-in-Collioure view of art history. While the show is undoubtedly historically accurate, it gives an insidiously picturesque view of a moment when at least a couple of the artists—Matisse and Derain—were taking a leap into the artistic unknown. The geographic approach (and the large number of less-than-scintillating canvases included in the show) has the effect of muffling the impact of major works.

Before you come to the paintings that Matisse and Derain did at Collioure, you go through a room that is dominated by the work that Henri Manguin and Louis Valtat did at St. Tropez. I understand that these lesser-known