Printed for you, as a giclée

Art Through Time · 1905 to 1910

Fauvism

Fauvism was the movement that, from 1905 to about 1910, set color free. Henri Matisse, André Derain and their friends in Paris painted with pure color straight from the tube: green shadows down a face, red trees, pink seas. Color no longer had to match the world. It had to carry feeling and light on its own.

The name was an insult. At the Salon d'Automne of 1905, the critic Louis Vauxcelles called the painters fauves, wild beasts.

When
1905 to 1910
Where
Paris
Began
The Salon d'Automne, 1905
Grew out of
Post-Impressionism, Pointillism

When was Fauvism, and how did it get its name?

Fauvism began in the summer of 1905, when Matisse and Derain painted side by side at Collioure, a fishing port on the Mediterranean near the Spanish border, as in Derain's Harbour of Collioure. In October they hung their summer's work in one room of the Salon d'Automne in Paris, with Albert Marquet, Henri Manguin, Charles Camoin, Maurice de Vlaminck and others. In the middle of the room stood a small sculpture in the manner of the Renaissance. "Donatello among the wild beasts," Vauxcelles wrote, and the name stuck.

Its height lasted barely three years. By 1908 the group had scattered: Georges Braque had turned to Cézanne and to Picasso, and Matisse was moving toward the calm, flat color of his later work. The same critic named the next movement too. In 1908 he described Braque's new landscapes as made of little cubes.

How to recognize Fauvism

  • Pure, unmixed color, often straight from the tube, in reds, oranges, greens and blues at full strength.
  • Color that isn't true to nature. In Matisse's The Green Stripe, a green line runs down the middle of his wife's face.
  • No shadow in grey or brown. Light and shade are both made of color, a warm side against a cool side.
  • Broad, quick brushstrokes and patches of bare canvas left showing.
  • Simple, flattened shapes with strong outlines, closer to a poster than to a photograph.
  • Sun and leisure. Mediterranean ports, beaches, boats, the Seine and the people closest to the painter.

The Fauvism artists

Most of the Fauves met at one of three places. Matisse, Marquet, Manguin and Camoin were students of Gustave Moreau at the École des Beaux-Arts in Paris. Derain and Vlaminck shared a studio at Chatou, on the Seine west of Paris; Derain later said that in their hands colors became charges of dynamite. Raoul Dufy, Othon Friesz and Braque all grew up in the port of Le Havre.

They learned from the painters just before them: Van Gogh's color, Gauguin's flat shapes, and the bright dots of Paul Signac, with whom Matisse spent the summer of 1904 at Saint-Tropez, painting The Bay of Saint-Tropez. Dufy said that seeing Matisse's work of that summer opened his eyes. His Les Affiches à Trouville of 1906 turns a row of posters on a seaside promenade into blocks of pure color.

Famous Fauvism paintings

What came after Fauvism?

Braque took the Fauves' freedom in another direction. After the Cézanne retrospective of 1907 he began, with Picasso, to break objects into planes: Cubism. In Germany, the young painters of Die Brücke in Dresden and, from 1908, Wassily Kandinsky, Gabriele Münter and Alexej von Jawlensky at Murnau pushed Fauve color toward inner feeling: Expressionism.

Matisse stayed with color for the rest of his life. In his Notes of a Painter of 1908 he wrote that he dreamed of an art of balance, purity and serenity, something like a good armchair that rests a tired body.

Fauvism painters

More Fauvism paintings

See Fauvism on the timelineEvery art movement in order