Fauvism

Henri Matisse once said, “I don't paint things, I paint the differences between them.” Like Matisse, the Fauves believed that art should not duplicate “the natural world” and thus created a style that revolutionized both the use of colors and the rendition if images captured by the senses in the concrete world. The textbook characteristics of Fauvist works are the bright, dissonant color, the crude urgency of surface, the distorted drawing and the love of brisk - all evidences of the raw sensation derived from the intense rejection of expressing reality as it is.

What preceded the birth of Fauvism were canonized art movements like Impressionism and Expressionism. At the end of the nineteenth century, neo-Impressionist painters were already using pure colors, believing that their paint should be dropped on the canvas without any alteration to its tone and hue, but they applied those colors to their canvases in small strokes. The Fauves on the other hand, rejected the impressionist palette of soft, shimmering tones in favor of radical new style, full of violent color and bold distortions. Characterized by intense and exuberant colors, the art movement began in Europe during the Modern Art era.

Fauvism is a movement that was first shown in the 1905 Salon d'Automne in Paris. The Salon d'Automne was intended to exhibit works that were more cutting edge. The Salon was against the more conservative and traditional Salons in France. Fauvists (including Matisse, Vlaminck, and Derain) were exhibited in the Salle VII, and were nicknamed "The Caged Beasts" by a critic at the time.

After the first “Fauves” exhibit in 1905 in Paris, a critic mockingly pointed to a renaissance-like sculpture in the middle of the same gallery as the exhibition and exclaimed derisively 'Donatello au milieu des fauves!' ('Donatello among the wild beasts!'). The name caught on, and was gleefully accepted by the artists themselves.

Fauvism was a short-lived movement, lasting only as long as its originator, Henri Matisse (1869-1954), fought to find the artistic freedom he needed. The movement included Paul Gauguin, Raoul Dufy, Maurice de Vlaminck, Georges Braque and Andre Derain amongst many others. These painters never formed a movement in the strict sense of the word, but for years they would nurse a shared ambition, before each went his separate and more personal way. The movement also didn’t have unifying doctrine the way the Impressionists did. As Time writer Robert Hughes wrote in his coverage of a Fauvists retrospective at the Museum of Modern Art in New York,

“The liberation of color achieved by the Fauves was of large but finite consequence: Fauvism was not a style that could be developed. The phlegmatic Georges Braque observed, "You can't remain forever in a state of paroxysm."

When present viewers look at these works, the element of shock and surprise no longer preoccupies their minds. The unnatural colors, once used by the Fauves as a “revolutionary” element in their work, has become such a large part of modern art that one needs to understand the intent of Matisse and his disciples to fully appreciate the significance of the movement. In terms of the autonomy of color, the Fauves simply did more than pave the way for a new kind of aesthetic, one filled with colors and rather incongruous with the natural world.