The Fauves

The beginning of Modernism in art is often attributed to the Salon d'Automne in Paris in 1905 when a small group of painters, exhibiting together in Room 7, showed work with a completely new style and concept. The art critic Louis Vauxcelles, on seeing a conventional sculpture of a boy among these new paintings, is said to have commented, "C'est Donatello dans la cage aux fauves!" - "It's Donatello [i.e. a classical sculptor] in the middle of the wild beasts' cage!". The name 'Fauves' caught on, becoming a term of abuse - although it had not been intended as such - and the furore that followed made the artists famous.

Among the original Fauves were Henri Matisse (1869 - 1954), Maurice de Vlaminck (1876 - 1958) and André Derain (1880 - 1954). One of their assistants was Raoul Dufy (1877 - 1953), who also became closely associated with Fauvism. The movement, though influential, was short-lived and only a transitional stage for many of the artists involved. By 1908 they were experimenting with other styles and forms such as Cubism, although Matisse continued to pursue the tenets of the movement he had originated throughout his long life.

Unlike the Impressionists who wanted to imitate the effects of light by using colour, the Fauves aimed to create light through their use of colour. For them the subject of painting, whether still life, portrait or landscape, was always colour itself, and the depiction of reality was secondary to the formal issues being explored. In this non-objective art detail was eliminated, nature was simplified and modified, and colour was used for its own sake. Matisse explained, "When I use a green it is not grass. When I use a blue it is not sky".

Fauve artists experimented with the relationship of colours to each other, applying pure, unblended colour straight from the tube so that colour mixing was achieved by the eye of the viewer and not on the palette. Since they used flat colour with no tonal modelling to create an illusion of three dimensions, there was a resultant emphasis on shape, pattern and surface. Colour structured the composition and generated rhythm and movement. Colour was intensified by the juxtaposition of complementaries like red/green, blue/orange, yellow/purple, which seem to vibrate when placed together.

Fauve painting, standing as it did on the threshold of two centuries, unlocked the door between representation or pictorial illusion and abstraction or art for art's sake - "not everything, but the foundation of everything" as Matisse believed.