Fauvism: Wild Colour, Matisse and Derain

Fauvism is a short-lived art movement in France around 1905–1908 in which colour is freed from reality. The artists, led by Henri Matisse and André Derain, painted skies red and faces green in pure, strong colours meant to express feeling and to build the structure of the picture.

Facts

The scandal of 1905

In the autumn of 1905 a group of paintings was shown in a room of its own at the Salon d’Automne in Paris. A Renaissance-style sculpture by Albert Marque also stood there, and the critic Louis Vauxcelles wrote that it was like a Donatello among wild beasts, les fauves. The nickname stuck. It referred to the wild colours of the pictures around it, among them Henri Matisse’s Woman with a Hat, whose face was painted in green, pink and yellow and which his friends Leo and Gertrude Stein bought.

In the summer of 1905 Matisse and André Derain had worked side by side in the fishing village of Collioure on the Mediterranean. The strong light made them push colour to the limit. Maurice de Vlaminck, who worked by the Seine outside Paris, painted with similar force and enthusiasm. In 1906 Derain painted a series of views of the Thames in London, among them Charing Cross Bridge, on commission from the art dealer Ambroise Vollard.

Models and ideas

The Fauves built on Paul Gauguin’s flat, symbolic fields of colour, on Vincent van Gogh’s intense brushwork, as in Sunflowers, and on Georges Seurat’s colour theory, as in La Grande Jatte. From Seurat and his followers they took the division into pure dabs of colour, but they replaced the science with spontaneity.

The idea was that colour could carry the picture on its own. A red road or a blue forest did not have to be true, only to work in the whole. Matisse later said that he wanted to create an art of balance and purity, “a good armchair” for tired people, which shows how little he wanted to shock and how much he wanted to create harmony. His large Joy of Life of 1905–1906 shows nude figures dancing and resting in a landscape of pure colours and flowing lines.

Matisse after Fauvism

Fauvism as a group dissolved as early as about 1908. Derain moved towards a stricter, more classical style, and Georges Braque left the group for Cubism. Matisse, by contrast, continued under the sign of colour and simplified his forms more and more. In Dance of 1910 the whole composition is made of five nude figures in red against blue and green, without shadows and without perspective.

In 1908 Matisse opened a school of his own in Paris, where many foreign artists learned his ideas. Among them were several Swedes, such as Isaac Grünewald, Sigrid Hjertén, Einar Jolin and Leander Engström, who took the pure colours home. Hjertén’s Studio Interior shows the Swedish variant, often called “the young ones”.

Why Fauvism matters

Fauvism was the first of the great avant-garde movements of the twentieth century and paved the way for Expressionism in Germany; Wassily Kandinsky and his colleagues had seen the French pictures. It also opened the way to abstract colour painting, in which colour becomes the main point of the picture. See also the avant-garde and the French avant-garde.

The difference from Expressionism is often a matter of tone. The Fauves were more playful, bright and decorative, whereas the German Expressionists were darker and more anxious. Read more about the difference in the guides to Expressionism and Post-Impressionism, and about the role of colour under colour.

How to recognise it

Exercise

What does the word fauves, which gave Fauvism its name, mean?