Fauvism

Fauvism was a style of painting that began in France early in the 20th century. The artists who worked in this style were called *les Fauves*—French for "the wild beasts." They focused on bold color and the physical qualities of paint itself, rather than on realistic representation, which had still mattered to the Impressionists. The movement’s two main figures were Henri Matisse and André Derain.

The Fauves’ work featured aggressive brushwork and jarring colors, with subjects that were simplified and abstracted. The style grew out of Van Gogh’s Post-Impressionism, mixed with the pointillism of Seurat and other Neo-Impressionists like Paul Signac. Paul Cézanne and Paul Gauguin were also important influences; Gauguin’s use of flat, intense color in his Tahitian paintings especially shaped Derain’s work in 1905. Gauguin had once told a fellow artist to paint trees yellow, shadows blue, and leaves red, using pure pigment. Fauvism is often compared to Expressionism because of its raw color and free brushwork. Some of the Fauves were among the first avant-garde artists to collect African and Oceanic art, as well as other non-Western and folk art, which later helped lead some of them toward Cubism.

The movement’s inspirational teacher was Gustave Moreau, a Symbolist painter who taught at the École des Beaux-Arts in Paris. In the 1890s, he taught Matisse, Albert Marquet, Henri Manguin, Georges Rouault, and Charles Camoin. Critics saw Moreau as the group’s philosophical leader until Matisse took that role in 1904. Moreau encouraged his students’ originality and the expressive power of pure color. Matisse later said Moreau did not set them on the right paths but led them off the roads, disturbing their complacency. After Moreau died in 1898, the artists found other inspirations.

In 1896, Matisse—then an unknown student—visited the Impressionist painter John Russell on Belle Île, off Brittany. Matisse had never seen an Impressionist work before and was so shocked he left after ten days, saying he could not stand it. He returned the next year as Russell’s student, trading his earth tones for bright Impressionist colors. Russell, a close friend of Van Gogh, gave Matisse a Van Gogh drawing and taught him color theory.

In 1901, Maurice de Vlaminck saw Van Gogh’s work at an exhibition and declared he loved Van Gogh more than his own father. He began squeezing paint directly from the tube onto the canvas. Around the same time, the artists discovered pre-Renaissance French art at a 1904 exhibition of French Primitives. They also collected African sculpture—Vlaminck, Derain, and Matisse were early collectors.

Many Fauve traits first came together in Matisse’s 1904 painting *Luxe, Calme et Volupté*, painted while he was in Saint-Tropez with Paul Signac and Henri-Edmond Cross. Unlike Cézanne and Degas, who were influenced by railway travel, the Fauves were shaped by the experience of driving a car. Matisse later painted landscapes from the driver’s seat. Derain replaced his Bugatti cars several times, and Vlaminck owned a sports car; in his 1929 novel *Dangerous Corner*, he described the visual sensation of driving at 110 kilometers per hour.

At the Salon d’Automne of 1905, the critic Louis Vauxcelles saw bold canvases by Matisse, Derain, Marquet, Vlaminck, Kees van Dongen, Camoin, Robert Deborne, and Jean Puy. He called them “fauves,” or wild beasts, giving the movement its name. Vauxcelles wrote that their work was like “Donatello among the wild beasts,” contrasting their “orgy of pure tones” with a Renaissance-style sculpture in the same room. Henri Rousseau was not a Fauve, but his large jungle painting *The Hungry Lion Throws Itself on the Antelope* hung near Matisse’s work and may have inspired the critic’s phrase. Vauxcelles’ comment appeared in the newspaper *Gil Blas* on October 17, 1905, and soon became common usage. The paintings drew harsh criticism—one critic said a pot of paint had been flung in the public’s face—but also some praise. The most attacked work was Matisse’s *Woman with a Hat*, which was eventually purchased.