Matisse’s Portrait with a Green Strip

Matisse’s Portrait with a Green Strip (1905) was one of the boldest paintings in the new style.

A simplified strongly modeled portrait his wife, the painting is disturbing in its abrupt juxtapositions of road areas of clashing colors. One side of the face is yellow divided by a green band from the side, which is pink. To the left is a yellow-green complexion, suggesting youth, beauty, sex, suspicion and even envy; to the right are rough unblended pink-white stokes, radiating energy, love, constancy, perseverance age and wisdom. 

Matisse used color to transform a conventional subject into a vibrating, original design. Energizing the face, the unexpected streak allows the head to compete with the assertive background.

In this painting Matisse liberated color from any obligation to describe the face of his wife in naturalistic terms, rendering her hair, face, eyes, and mouth in nonnaturalistic shades of blue, green, yellow and pink.

He believed in the power of the color as the expressive mainspring of all the elements of picture making.
Matisse’s Portrait with a Green Strip

False Start by Jasper Johns

False Start by Jasper Johns 

In 1988, False Start brought $17 million at the auction at Sotheby’s. In year 2006, the painting was sold to the Kenneth C. Griffin, for $80 million, making it the most expensive painting to be sold by a living artist. 

The False Start is one of the popular oil paintings of Jasper Johns and was made on a canvas 170.8 centimeters long and 137.2 centimeters wide. The colorful painting has always impressed the people since the time it was released. The magnificent use of varied kinds of colors in painting is most impressive. 

False Start manages to be both clotted and expansive, a field of interlocking patches and passages of red, yellow, and blue with orange and gray, each of which is named throughout the compositions. Such as it is, this composition is an allover affair with no hierarchy of parts, in good, second generation abstract expressionist. 

False Start by Jasper Johns