WHAT IS FAUVISM?

By George Philip LeBourdais

Henri Matisse did not seem like one to rock the boat. Serious, intelligent, and embarking on a promising career after studying law in Paris, his path in life appeared entirely bourgeois. When his mother gave him art supplies to help him recover from an illness, however, he was, in his words, “bitten by the demon of painting.”

The tone of this statement is fitting for an artist who was responsible for the first avant-garde European art movement of the 20th century, Fauvism, the name of which means “wild beasts.” To a contemporary eye, the intensely colorful landscape and portrait paintings of the Fauvists, often characterized by a rough application of paint rendered directly from the tube, might read as more joyful and celebratory than savage in their bright, non-naturalistic hues and energetic vitality—but these were very different times.

And as with some other avant-garde styles, Fauvism acquired its name through an insult. Reviewing the 1905 Salon d’Automne art exhibition in Paris—an annual, independent showcase of progressive art—the renowned art critic Louis Vauxcelles (who later coined the term Cubism) found the brushwork by Matisse, André Derain, Maurice de Vlaminck, Charles Camoin, Georges Rouault, and certain other artists displayed at the salon that year to be coarse and untamed, with an “orgy of colors.” The name “fauve” would become a badge of honor for the artists.

The most famous Fauvist work at the salon, Matisse’s Luxe, Calme, et Volupté (Luxury, Calm, and Desire), finished in 1904, was a shocking, visionary work. With a title borrowed from a poem by Charles Baudelaire, the work had the structure of traditional, idealized landscapes, but its aesthetic—with staccato brushstrokes, the white of the canvas showing through, and non-naturalistic, expressive color and detail—was entirely contemporary, an unrestrained, celebration of the here and now.

Nearby, his 1905 painting Femme au chapeau (Woman with a Hat) spoke even more forcefully of this foundational moment for Fauvism. Its presence alongside other jarringly colored works by Dérain, Camoin, and Vlaminck made the central gallery in the Grand Palais seem like a “cage.” A half-length portrait of Matisse’s wife, Amélie, Woman with a Hat was full of bourgeois accoutrements: a gloved hand holding a paper fan, the elaborate hat that gives the work its title. Yet these features emerge from a strident, unhinged palette that defied the rules of academic painting and offended bourgeois sensibilities……..

https://www.artsy.net/article/artsy-editorial-matisse-fauvists-harnessed-expressive-power-color