The centerpiece of the Barnes’ collection is Matisse’s transcendent masterpiece The Joy of Life, which is given a prominent position in a small gallery on the second floor. Previously, it was in a humiliating and dimly lit position on the stairway landing, which Barnes thought enhanced its feeling of motion. The Joy of Life is Matisse’s most famous Fauvist painting, full of pure expressive bright color. It’s a landscape filled with brilliantly colored forest, meadow, sea, and sky, and populated with resting and moving nude figures. The shifting perspective and scale, quite radical at the time, draws you into the painting. The painting was originally purchased by Gertrude Stein, who then sold it to Barnes. As Stein would later say, “Matisse had painted Le Bonheur de vivre and had created a new formula for color that would leave its mark on every painter of the period.
