Fauvism

Fauvism is an art movement dating from 1904. The gallery holds 162 works in this movement, including works by Henri Matisse, Albert Marquet and Othon Friesz. Browse Fauvism paintings, portraits, pictures and artworks from the world's public-domain museum collections.

Fauvism was the first avant-garde movement of the twentieth century, a brief but incendiary episode that erupted in France around 1905 and had largely dissolved by 1908. Its roots lay in Post-Impressionism: the saturated, emotive color of Vincent van Gogh and Paul Gauguin and the divided brushwork of Georges Seurat's Neo-Impressionism gave a younger generation license to treat color as an autonomous expressive force rather than a tool for describing nature. In the summer of 1905, Henri Matisse and André Derain painted side by side in the Mediterranean fishing port of Collioure, pushing their palettes toward an unprecedented intensity and laying the foundations of the style.

The movement was christened by accident. At the 1905 Salon d'Automne in Paris, the brilliantly colored canvases hung together in one gallery scandalized visitors, and the critic Louis Vauxcelles, writing in the November issue of L'Illustration, dubbed the painters "les fauves"—the wild beasts. The name stuck. Fauvist painting is defined by non-naturalistic, often arbitrary color applied in bold, flattened patches, vigorous and visibly loose brushwork, strong outlines, and a deliberately "unfinished" surface in which color itself becomes the true subject of the work.

Matisse was the movement's acknowledged leader, and his Woman with a Hat (1905) and the monumental Le Bonheur de vivre (1905–06) remain its touchstones. Derain occupied a middle ground between Matisse's control and the impetuous Maurice de Vlaminck; his blazing views of London Bridge and Charing Cross Bridge, commissioned by the dealer Ambroise Vollard, are among Fauvism's signature images. The wider circle included Albert Marquet, Raoul Dufy, Othon Friesz, Henri Manguin, Charles Camoin, Kees van Dongen, and the young Georges Braque. Matisse's Mediterranean canvases such as Olive Trees at Collioure and The Young Sailor II distill the Fauve fusion of southern light and pure pigment.

Fauvism was less a school than a shared moment, and by 1908 its members had scattered—Braque toward the analytical structure of Cubism, others returning to Cézanne's sense of order. Yet its liberation of color proved enormously consequential, feeding directly into German Expressionism, whose artists deployed a similarly aggressive palette to convey inner sensation, and securing color's place as a primary language of modern art.