Fauvism appeared in France in 1905 and lasted only a few years. Its name comes from the critic Louis Vauxcelles who, seeing a classical-style bust surrounded by brightly coloured canvases at the Salon d’Automne, wrote ‘Donatello chez les fauves’, Donatello among the wild beasts. At first a jibe, the word came to describe painters who freed colour from its descriptive role.
The Fauves applied pure colours in broad flat areas or vigorous strokes: a tree turns red, a face is crossed by a green stripe. Drawing is simplified, mod... Voir plus >
Fauvism appeared in France in 1905 and lasted only a few years. Its name comes from the critic Louis Vauxcelles who, seeing a classical-style bust surrounded by brightly coloured canvases at the Salon d’Automne, wrote ‘Donatello chez les fauves’, Donatello among the wild beasts. At first a jibe, the word came to describe painters who freed colour from its descriptive role.
The Fauves applied pure colours in broad flat areas or vigorous strokes: a tree turns red, a face is crossed by a green stripe. Drawing is simplified, modelling disappears and light arises from the contrast between tones.
In this way they extended the research of Van Gogh, Gauguin and Cézanne, figures of Post-Impressionism, and turned the small dabs of Pointillism into freer patches of colour.
Henri Matisse was its leading figure. After spending the summer of 1905 in Collioure with André Derain, he painted ‘Woman with a Hat’ and the ‘Portrait of Madame Matisse’, known as ‘The Green Stripe’. Derain and Maurice de Vlaminck, based in Chatou, shared the same daring, while Albert Marquet, Kees van Dongen, Georges Braque and Raoul Dufy joined the movement in their own way.
By 1907, the group was breaking up. Braque turned to Cubism with Picasso, while Matisse pursued his exploration of colour up to the paper cut-outs of his final years. In Germany, the Fauvist example fed into Expressionism.
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