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Chaim Soutine - Expressionism

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André Derain - Fauvism

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Franz Marc - Expressionism

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Henri Matisse - Fauvism

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André Derain - Fauvism

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Edvard Munch - Expressionism

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“Although many Expressionists initially welcomed the war, believing it could be the apocalyptic event that would wash away the old order and make way for a better, less constrained society in the future, the reality of the war soon disabused them of this notion,”

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“Although many Expressionists initially welcomed the war, believing it could be the apocalyptic event that would wash away the old order and make way for a better, less constrained society in the future, the reality of the war soon disabused them of this notion,”

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"Wild Beasts"

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Fauvism - Overview - Goodbye-Art Academy

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By Daniel Castillo ( author page), Dec. 2003

There were several characteristics which Germany possessed after the First World War which made them vulnerable to being manipulated by someone like Adolf Hitler. As in most nations, the economic factors of the time play a significant role in determining how a society will behave. Germany was economically devastated after a draining defeat in World War I. Due to the Versailles treaty, Germany was forced to pay incredibly sizeable reparations to France and Great Britain. In addition, the Versailles treaty, which many agreed was far too harsh, forced Germany to give up thirteen percent of its land.

Lines would build up filled with people who wanted to buy the few items left in stores ( source)

Stacks of German Marks, which were practically worthless due to super inflation ( source)

At first Germany tried to recover from the war by way of social spending. Germany began creating transportation projects, modernization of power plants and gas works. These were all used to battle the increasing unemployment rate. Social spending was rising at an unbelievable rate. In 1913 the government was spending approximately 20.5 per resident; by 1925 it had risen to almost 65 marks per resident and finally in 1929 it reached over one hundred marks per resident. The elevating amounts of money which were used for social spending combined with plummeting revenues caused continuing deficits. Eventually the municipal finance collapsed in 1930. Although it seemed as if the collapse was due to debt, in actuality ordinary budgets were the reason for the initial collapse. Municipal officials and politicians were unable to restore order to the budgets. Further adding to Germany's economic problems, the revenue from income tax began to fall. In 1913, over fifty three percent of all tax revenues was from income, but in 1925, it dropped down to 28%. As the returns on income taxes decreased, the government began to depend much more on state trade and property tax. The government also became highly dependent on the profits made from municipal utilities, such as electric power plants.

Even with all of Germany's economic shortcomings, it could have still been possible to make reparation payments if foreign countries had not placed protective tariffs on Germany's goods. With the income Germany could have gained by selling goods in foreign countries, for relatively low prices, reparation payments could have become feasible. The protective tariffs made this idea impossible and further depressed the German economy. Faced with reparation payments they could not afford, Germany began printing exaggerated amounts of money. This threw Germany into a state of super inflation. Inflation reached the point where millions of marks were worthless. Cartoons of the time depicted people with wheelbarrows full of money who could not buy a loaf of bread. "With the approach of world crisis foreign lenders withdrew capital and markets further closed against German imports" (Sweezy 8). The United States was an extremely significant example of this. When the U.S. was hit by the great depression they immediately sought to get the loans, which they had made to German, paid back. This, in addition to all of Germany's other problems, practically caused the German economy to collapse.

With Germany at its weakest and most vulnerable point, Hitler took the opportunity to begin his ascent to power. Even to this date, in a country as diverse and liberally minded as the United States, when the economy is down people desire somewhere to place the blame. For example, the current use of illegal immigrants from Mexico as scapegoats for economic hardships. In Germany, Hitler used the Jewish people as a scapegoat for all of Germany's problems. With disproportional numbers of wealthy Jewish business owners, Hitler convinced much of Germany that the Jews were to blame for the poor economic state.

Hitler had two significant ideas that helped launch him in to power. He had someone to blame for the economy and he had a plan for a swift economic recovery. Hitler outlined a plan where in four years he would completely eliminate unemployment throughout Germany. Even though his plan was a plan that would not raise the level of income for the enrichment of the people but an economic plan for military strength and victory the German people were eager to see any economic success. Hitler used an extremely detail and well-organized plan for economic revitalization. Through his method, Hitler was able to keep his promise of economic growth and begin his climb to power.

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By Daniel Castillo ( author page), Dec. 2003 There were several characteristics which Germany possessed after the First World War which made them vulnerable to being manipulated by someone like Adolf Hitler. As in most nations, the economic factors of the time play a significant role in determining how a society will behave.

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During the war, the energy that typified Expressionist painting darkened, becoming more somber. Few make the transformation clearer than Beckmann, who volunteered as a medic in World War I. Before the war, he was influenced by the Impressionists, but took a dramatic turn afterward.

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100 Years, 100 Legacies >

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World War I changed everything. From new countries to literature, from tanks to treaties and from flamethrowers to fashion, the conflict is still writ large on our lives 100 years on.

It gave birth to violent dictators and their ideologies but extended the electoral franchise to millions. It ushered in the era of mechanised warfare whilst laying the foundations for modern medicine. Empires crumbled, borders were redrawn, art movements flowered and women won the vote (even if you still had to be over 30 in some countries). Poets committed some of the most memorable imagery in modern verse to paper while a generation of writers would descend on Europe's war-torn cities and fashion a new style of literature.

After millions of men gave their lives on the battlefields of Europe, it was doubly tragic that a deadly influenza would claim up to 50 million more deaths in the conflict's immediate aftermath. World War I has given us daylight saving time, Dada, triage, chemical weapons, plastic surgery, fascism and, of course, another war. It invented new forms of killing and unearthed miraculous ways to save lives.

Wall Street Journal editors from around the world have selected 100 legacies that still shape our lives today. History is always open to interpretation, but as the war to end all wars retreats from living history, it feels more important than ever to remember its impact. It is everywhere you look.

Writers

Nathan Hodge, Art Patnaude, Tommy Stubbington, Andrew Peaple, Tom Mudd, Peter Evans, Sarah Sloat, Rory Jones, Alexis Flynn, Fiona Matthias, Harriet Torry, Alen Mattich, Chase Gummer, Laurence Eyton, Peter Stiff, Paul Hannon, Laurence Witherington, Gautam Naik, Christopher Lawton, Michael Wright, Neetha Mahadevan, Laurence Norman, Caitlan Reeg, Jovi Juan, Liza Hearon, Inti Landauro, Thomas Varela, Marcus Walker, Jake Lee, Shirley Wang, Stephen Fidler, Juhana Rossi, Will Lyons, Monica Houston-Waesch, Francesca Freeman, Peter Nurse, James Leigh, Max Colchester, Todd Buell, Frances Robinson, Adam Najberg, Matthew Walls, Yuka Hayashi, Jose DeCordoba, Selina Williams, Naftali Bendavid, David Winning, Geoffrey T. Smith, Charles Hutzler, Matina Stevis, Ayla Albayrak, Charles Forelle

Editors

Tom Mudd, Laurence Eyton, Sheila Courter, Margaret de Streel, Matthew Walls, Adrian Kerr, Peter Stiff, Perry Cleveland-Peck, Sofia McFarland, Tina Fuhr, Lydia Serota, Ese Erheriene, Jon Sindreu, Yvonne Dennis, John Crowley

Multimedia Producers

Dipti Kapadia, Mark Kelly, Parminder Bahra, Miho Inada, Menglin Huang, Ayla Albayrak, Monika Vosough, Billy Higgins, Beckey Bright, Tom DiFonzo, George Downs, Pat Minczeski, Michael Ovaska

Designers & Developers

Jovi Juan, Renee Lightner, Elliot Bentley

Consultant

David Tattersfield from the Western Front Association

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World War I Centenary: 100 Legacies of the Great War

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Close 100 Years, 100 Legacies > Thank you for viewing our World War I interactive project. To continue, please follow the link below to sign up, or log in if you are already a subscriber. Thank you for viewing our World War I interactive project.

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Comparing German Expressionism and Fauvism

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Avante-garde: the advance group in any field, especially in the visual, literary, or musical arts, whose works are characterized chiefly by unorthodox and experimental methods.

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Avante-garde: the advance group in any field, especially in the visual, literary, or musical arts, whose works are characterized chiefly by unorthodox and experimental methods.

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Expressionist artists often employed swirling, swaying, and exaggeratedly executed brushstrokes in the depiction of their subjects. These techniques were meant to convey the turgid emotional state of the artist reacting to the anxieties of the modern world.

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"Everyone who renders directly and honestly whatever drives him to create is one of us."

Synopsis

Expressionism emerged simultaneously in various cities across Germany as a response to a widespread anxiety about humanity's increasingly discordant relationship with the world and accompanying lost feelings of authenticity and spirituality. In part a reaction against Impressionism and academic art, Expressionism was inspired most heavily by the Symbolist currents in late-19 th-century art. Vincent van Gogh, Edvard Munch, and James Ensor proved particularly influential to the Expressionists, encouraging the distortion of form and the deployment of strong colors to convey a variety of anxieties and yearnings. The classic phase of the Expressionist movement lasted from approximately 1905 to 1920 and spread throughout Europe. Its example would later inform Abstract Expressionism, and its influence would be felt throughout the remainder of the century in German art. It was also a critical precursor to the Neo-Expressionist artists of the 1980s.

Key Ideas

The arrival of Expressionism announced new standards in the creation and judgment of art. Art was now meant to come forth from within the artist, rather than from a depiction of the external visual world, and the standard for assessing the quality of a work of art became the character of the artist's feelings rather than an analysis of the composition.

Expressionist artists often employed swirling, swaying, and exaggeratedly executed brushstrokes in the depiction of their subjects. These techniques were meant to convey the turgid emotional state of the artist reacting to the anxieties of the modern world.

Through their confrontation with the urban world of the early-20 th century, Expressionist artists developed a powerful mode of social criticism in their serpentine figural renderings and bold colors. Their representations of the modern city included alienated individuals - a psychological by-product of recent urbanization - as well as prostitutes, who were used to comment on capitalism's role in the emotional distancing of individuals within cities.

Most Important Art

Expressionism Artworks in Focus:

Beginnings

With the turn of the century in Europe, shifts in artistic styles and vision erupted as a response to the major changes in the atmosphere of society. New technologies and massive urbanization efforts altered the individual's worldview, and artists reflected the psychological impact of these developments by moving away from a realistic representation of what they saw toward an emotional and psychological rendering of how the world affected them. The roots of Expressionism can be traced to certain Post-Impressionist artists like Edvard Munch in Norway, as well as Gustav Klimt in the Vienna Secession, and finally emerged in Germany in 1905.

Edvard Munch in Norway

The late-19 th-century Norwegian Post-Impressionist painter Edvard Munch emerged as an important source of inspiration for the Expressionists. His vibrant and emotionally charged works opened up new possibilities for introspective expression. In particular, Munch's frenetic canvases expressed the anxiety of the individual within the newly modernized European society; his famous painting The Scream (1893) evidenced the conflict between spirituality and modernity as a central theme of his work. By 1905 Munch's work was well known within Germany and he was spending much of his time there as well, putting him in direct contact with the Expressionists.

Gustav Klimt in Austria

Another figure in the late-19 th century that had an impact upon the development of Expressionism was Gustav Klimt, who worked in the Austrian Art Nouveau style of the Vienna Secession. Klimt's lavish mode of rendering his subjects in a bright palette, elaborately patterned surfaces, and elongated bodies was a step toward the exotic colors, gestural brushwork, and jagged forms of the later Expressionists. Klimt was a mentor to painter Egon Schiele, and introduced him to the works of Edvard Munch and Vincent van Gogh, among others, at an exhibition of their work in 1909.

The Advent of Expressionism in Germany

Although it included various artists and styles, Expressionism first emerged in 1905, when a group of four German architecture students who desired to become painters - Ernst Ludwig Kirchner, Fritz Bleyl, Karl Schmidt-Rottluff, and Erich Heckel - formed the group Die Brücke (the Bridge) in the city of Dresden. A few years later, in 1911, a like-minded group of young artists formed Der Blaue Reiter (The Blue Rider) in Munich, after the rejection of Wassily Kandinsky's painting The Last Judgment (1910) from a local exhibition. In addition to Kandinsky, the group included Franz Marc, Paul Klee, and August Macke, among others, all of whom made up the loosely associated group.

The Term "Expressionism"

The term "Expressionism" is thought to have been coined in 1910 by Czech art historian Antonin Matejcek, who intended it to denote the opposite of Impressionism. Whereas the Impressionists sought to express the majesty of nature and the human form through paint, the Expressionists, according to Matejcek, sought only to express inner life, often via the painting of harsh and realistic subject matter. It should be noted, however, that neither Die Brücke, nor similar sub-movements, ever referred to themselves as Expressionist, and, in the early years of the century, the term was widely used to apply to a variety of styles, including Post-Impressionism.

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Expressionism Overview Continues

Concepts and Styles

Die Brücke: Kirchner, Schmidt-Rottluff, Heckel, and Bleyl

Influenced by artists such as Munch, van Gogh, and Ensor, the members of the Dresden-based Die Brücke group sought to convey raw emotion through provocative images of modern society. They depicted scenes of city dwellers, prostitutes, and dancers in the city's streets and nightclubs, presenting the decadent underbelly of German society. In works such as Kirchner's Street, Berlin (1913), they emphasized the alienation inherent to modern society and the loss of spiritual communion between individuals in urban culture; fellow city dwellers are distanced from one another, acting as mere commodities, as in the prostitutes at the forefront of Kirchner's composition.

Unlike the pastoral scenes of Impressionism and the academic drawings of Neoclassicism, Die Brücke artists used distorted forms and jarring, unnatural pigments to elicit the viewer's emotional response. The group was similarly united by a reductive and primitive aesthetic, a revival of older media and medieval German art, in which they used graphic techniques such as woodblock printing to create crude, jagged forms.

The group published a woodcut broadsheet in 1906, called Programme, to accompany their first exhibition. It summarized their break with prevailing academic traditions calling for a freer, youth-oriented aesthetic. Although mostly written by Kirchner, this poster served as manifesto stating the ideals of Die Brücke. The members of Die Brücke drew largely from the writings of German philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche in terms of both their artistic project and their philosophical grounding. Their name came from a quote from Thus Spoke Zarathustra (1883-85) that states, "What is great in man is that he is a bridge and not an end." The group exhibited and collaborated through 1913, when Kirchner penned Chronik der Brücke (Brücke Chronicle) and the collective effectively dissolved.

Der Blaue Reiter: Kandinsky, Macke, Klee, and Marc

The artists of Der Blaue Reiter group shared an inclination towards abstraction, symbolic content, and spiritual allusion. They sought to express the emotional aspects of being through highly symbolic and brightly colored renderings. Their name emerged from the symbol of the horse and rider, derived from one of Wassily Kandinsky's paintings; for Kandinsky, the rider symbolized the transition from the tangible world into the spiritual realm and thus acted as a metaphor for artistic practice. For other members such as Franz Marc, Paul, Klee, and Auguste Macke, this notion became a central principle for transcending realistic depiction and delving into abstraction.

Although Der Blaue Reiter never published a manifesto, its members were united by their aesthetic innovations, which were influenced by medieval and primitivist art forms, Cubism, and Fauvism. However, the group itself was short-lived; with the outbreak of World War I in 1914, Franz Marc and Auguste Macke were drafted into German military service and were killed soon after. The Russian members of the group - Wassily Kandinsky, Alexej von Jawlensky, and others - were all forced to return home. Der Blaue Reiter dissolved immediately thereafter.

French Expressionism: Rouault, Soutine, and Chagall

Expressionism's elasticity has meant that many artists beyond Germany's borders have been identified with the style. Georges Rouault, the French artist sometimes described as an Expressionist, may have influenced the Germans, rather than the other way around. He learned his vivid use of color and distortion of form from Fauvism, and, unlike his German Expressionist counterparts, Rouault expressed an affinity for his Impressionist predecessors, particularly for the work of Edgar Degas. He is well known for his devotion to religious subjects, and particularly for his many depictions of the crucifixion, rendered in rich color and heavy layers of paint.

The Russian-French Jewish artist Marc Chagall drew upon currents from Cubism, Fauvism, and Symbolism to create his own brand of Expressionism in which he often depicted dreamy scenes of his Belarusian hometown, Vitebsk. While in Paris during the height of the modernist avant-garde, Chagall developed a visual language of eccentric motifs: "ghostly figures floating in the sky, the gigantic fiddler dancing on miniature dollhouses, the livestock and transparent wombs and, within them, tiny offspring sleeping upside down." In 1914, his work was exhibited in Berlin, and had an impact on the German Expressionists extending beyond World War I. He never associated his work with a specific movement, and considered his repertoire to be a vocabulary of images meaningful to himself, but they inspired many, including the Surrealists. Pablo Picasso remarked in the 1950s, "When Matisse dies, Chagall will be the only painter left who understands what color really is."

Chaim Soutine, the Russian-Jewish, Paris-based painter, was a major proponent of the development of Parisian Expressionism. He synthesized elements from Impressionism, the French Academic tradition, and his own personal vision into an individualized technique and version of the style. The artist's expressive style has proved highly influential on subsequent generations.

Austrian Expressionism: Kokoschka and Schiele

Austrian artists such as Oskar Kokoschka and Egon Schiele, were inspired by German Expressionism, but interpreted the style in their individual and personalized manners never forming an official association like the Germans. Kokoschka and Schiele sought to express the decadence of modern Austria through similarly expressive representations of the human body; by sinuous lines, garish colors, and distorted figures, both artists imbued their subjects with highly sexual and psychological themes. Although Kokschka and Schiele were the central proponents of the movement in Austria, Kokoschka became increasingly involved in German Expressionist circles; he left Austria and moved to Germany in 1910. Initially Kokoschka worked in a Viennese Art Nouveau style, but starting in 1908 he instinctively worked as an Expressionist, passionately seeking to expose an inner sensibility of the sitter in his early portraits. Schiele left Vienna in 1912 but remained in Austria, where he worked and exhibited until his death in the worldwide influenza epidemic of 1918.

Later Developments

While certain artists rejected Expressionism, others would continue to expand upon its innovations as a style. For example, in the 1920s, Kandinsky transitioned to completely non-objective paintings and watercolors, which emphasized color balance and archetypal forms, rather than figurative representation. However, Expressionism would have its most direct impact in Germany and would continue to shape its art for decades afterwards. After World War I, Expressionism began to lose impetus and fragment. The Neue Sachlichkeit (New Objectivity) movement developed as a direct response to the highly emotional tenets of Expressionism, while the Neo-Expressionists emerged in Germany and then in the United States much later in the 20 th century, reprising the earlier Expressionist style.

New Objectivity: Dix, Grosz and Beckmann

Already by 1918, the Dada manifesto claimed, "Expressionism...no longer has anything to do with the efforts made by active people." But its ethos would have a vivid afterlife; it was crucial in the early formation of artists Otto Dix, George Grosz, and Max Beckmann, who together formed the movement known as the Neue Sachlichkeit (New Objectivity). These artists sought, as the name suggests, an unsentimental and objective approach to artistic production. Their naturalistic renderings of individuals and urban scenes highlighted this new aesthetic and paralleled the general attitude of practicality that characterized Weimar culture.

Neo-Expressionism: Baselitz, Kiefer, and Schnabel

The emergence of Georg Baselitz's paintings of layered, vibrant colors and distorted figures in the 1960s, and of Anselm Kiefer's images buried amidst thick impasto built up from a variety of materials on the canvas in the 1970s, signaled an important and influential revival of the style within Germany, which would eventually culminate in a global Neo-Expressionist movement in the 1980s. Artists in New York City, like Julian Schnabel, also employed thick layers of paint, unnatural color palettes and gestural brushwork to hearken back to the Expressionist movement earlier in the 20 th century.

The original Expressionist movement's ideas about spirituality, primitivism, and the value of abstract art would also be hugely influential on an array of unrelated movements, including Abstract Expressionism. The Expressionists' metaphysical outlook and instinctive discomfort with the modern world impelled them to antagonistic attitudes that would continue to be characteristic of various avant-garde movements throughout the century.

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Expressionism Movement, Artists and Major Works

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"Everyone who renders directly and honestly whatever drives him to create is one of us." Expressionism emerged simultaneously in various cities across Germany as a response to a widespread anxiety about humanity's increasingly discordant relationship with the world and accompanying lost feelings of authenticity and spirituality.

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Fauvism valued individual expression. The artist's direct experience of his subjects, his emotional response to nature, and his intuition were all more important than academic theory or elevated subject matter. All elements of painting were employed in service of this goal.

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"If the trees look yellow to the artist, then painted a bright yellow they must be."

Synopsis

Fauvism, the first twentieth-century movement in modern art, was initially inspired by the examples of Vincent van Gogh, Paul Gauguin, Georges Seurat, and Paul Cézanne. The Fauves ("wild beasts") were a loosely allied group of French painters with shared interests. Several of them, including Henri Matisse, Albert Marquet, and Georges Rouault, had been pupils of the Symbolist artist Gustave Moreau and admired the older artist's emphasis on personal expression. Matisse emerged as the leader of the group, whose members shared the use of intense color as a vehicle for describing light and space, and who redefined pure color and form as means of communicating the artist's emotional state. In these regards, Fauvism proved to be an important precursor to Cubism and Expressionism as well as a touchstone for future modes of abstraction.

Key Ideas

One of Fauvism's major contributions to modern art was its radical goal of separating color from its descriptive, representational purpose and allowing it to exist on the canvas as an independent element. Color could project a mood and establish a structure within the work of art without having to be true to the natural world.

Another of Fauvism's central artistic concerns was the overall balance of the composition. The Fauves' simplified forms and saturated colors drew attention to the inherent flatness of the canvas or paper; within that pictorial space, each element played a specific role. The immediate visual impression of the work is to be strong and unified.

Above all, Fauvism valued individual expression. The artist's direct experience of his subjects, his emotional response to nature, and his intuition were all more important than academic theory or elevated subject matter. All elements of painting were employed in service of this goal.

Most Important Art

Fauvism Artworks in Focus:

Fauvism Overview Continues Below

Beginnings

In the opening years of the twentieth century, Post-Impressionist painters working in France such as Van Gogh, Gauguin, Seurat, and Cézanne were considered leaders in avant-garde art. Their collective experiments with paint application, subject matter, expressive line, and pure color were advances that fed the emergence of Fauvism. Symbolism, with its emphasis on the artist's internal vision, was another important influence. From another source, the European reassessment of African sculpture as art rather than an anthropological curiosity introduced new ideas of form and representation to the European modernists.

Matisse as Fauvist Pioneer

Henri Matisse is generally considered the principal founding artist of Fauvism. Like many of his contemporaries, Matisse was greatly influenced by Moreau's teaching that personal expression was among the most important attributes of a great painter. Also of considerable importance to the young Matisse were the techniques and systematic visual language of Pointillism, which had been spearheaded by his fellow countrymen Georges Seurat, Paul Signac, and Henri-Edmond Cross. Although Matisse did not apply Pointillist theory directly to his own work, the application of tiny dots of paint in varying colors to create a harmonious visual tone was something that fascinated Matisse. His observation of this technique led him to develop "color structure," or large, flat areas of color that established a deliberate, decorative effect and sense of mood. He was also very aware of the Post-Impressionist work of Paul Gauguin, Pierre Bonnard, and Édouard Vuillard, whose integration of solid color and design was a departure from the flickering, momentary effect of Impressionist painting.

Synthesizing all these ideas, Matisse turned away from using subtle hues of mixed paints and began working with bright color, directly from the tube, as a means of conveying emotion. He had been working outdoors since the mid-1890s, and his travels to Corsica and the south of France in 1898 increased his interest in capturing the effect of strong natural light. A summer spent working alongside Signac and Cross at Saint-Tropez on the French Riviera in 1904 gave him a further opportunity to witness their techniques.

Fellow Fauves: Derain and de Vlaminck

During the same years as Matisse's initial experimentation with Post-Impressionist techniques, the two painters André Derain and Maurice de Vlaminck met in 1901 and began sharing a studio in Chatou, a western suburb of Paris. Working closely together, they developed their new mutual interest in bold color and directional brushwork.

Matisse met Derain in 1899, and two years later, through Derain, he met de Vlaminck. As an older and more established artist, he supported and encouraged these two kindred spirits, even introducing them to prospective dealers. In 1905 Matisse visited the studio in Chatou, where he was strongly impressed by de Vlaminck's use of pure color. Matisse invited Derain to spend the summer of 1905 with him in Collioure, a port and fishing town located on the southern coast of France. The two men spent this breakthrough summer working and refining their styles and techniques, producing numerous significant paintings during a crucial four-month period of collaboration.

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Fauvism Overview Continues

The 1905 Salon d'Automne

Later that year, the Salon d'Automne exhibition was held at the Grand Palais in Paris. Matisse, Derain, and de Vlaminck all exhibited works in this show; they were joined by other former students of Moreau, including Henri Manguin and Albert Marquet. The paintings on display were quite distinctive in their use of vivid, saturated color and spontaneous brushwork. Also included in the exhibition was a more traditional-looking Italianate sculptural bust by Marquet, and this figure's proximity to the garishly colored, energetically executed paintings prompted the critic Louis Vauxcelles to describe the scene as " Donatello parmi les fauves" ("Donatello among the wild beasts"). The term "Fauves" was thus coined for these artists; although it was pejorative in its original context, it endured.

Concepts and Styles

An Expanding Circle

Despite initial hostility from critics, many of the Fauves enjoyed commercial success following the Salon d'Automne exhibition of 1905. Their art was featured at additional exhibits held over the following years, notably at the Salon des Indépendants in 1907, where the main attraction was a large room dubbed "The Fauves' Den." Meanwhile, other artists began to join the central trio of Matisse, Derain, and de Vlaminck. The expanding group of Fauves (all based in France) eventually included Othon Friesz, Georges Rouault (another student of Gustave Moreau), Kees van Dongen, Georges Braque, and Raoul Dufy. These artists traveled together, shared studios, and exchanged ideas freely during the rather brief heyday of Fauvism.

The Primacy of Color

All the Fauves were intensely preoccupied with color as a means of personal expression. Color and the combination of colors constituted the intrinsic subject, form, and rhythm of their work. A sky could be orange, a tree could be blue, a face could be a combination of seemingly clashing colors; the end result was a wholly independent product of the artist's perception, rather than a faithful depiction of the original physical form. Additionally, compositional elements were built up through the placement of color, rather than through perspectival systems or draftsmanship.

Subject and Style

In their shared preoccupation with expression through color and form, these artists were generally less concerned with the novelty of their subject matter. Whereas the Impressionists and Post-Impressionists had depicted scenes of modern, urban life, such as the boulevards, cafés, and concert halls of Paris, the Fauves took more traditional subjects as their starting points. Their subject matter drew from the world around them and included portraits, landscapes, seascapes, and figures in interiors, but the visual impact of the color composition took primacy over any possible narrative or symbolism. Instead, they used their subjects as vehicles for the acts of observation and painting, with their active brushwork and non-naturalistic color as means of leading the viewer into their inner, creative journeys.

Later Developments

The Fauves' tendency to distort form and color in order to express inner sensations was a strong influence on the Expressionists, whose own artistic movement proved much longer-lived and more cohesive. The German Expressionists, led by such artists as Ernst Ludwig Kirchner and Karl Schmidt-Rottluff, employed a similarly aggressive use of color in their bustling Berlin street scenes and frequently grotesque portraiture.

Cézanne and Cubism

In a sense, Fauvism's demise can be also attributed to a renewal of interest in Cézanne. A Cézanne exhibition held in Paris in 1907 revived attention in the artist's work, particularly his emphasis on natural order and structure. Georges Braque, for example, began to favor a more restricted color palette, focusing more on subtle gradations of color and scale. This approach led Braque to fill his canvases with a crowded yet carefully ordered abundance of shapes and forms, as in his 1908 work Road near L'Estaque, which is unmistakably a crucial precursor to the artist's development of the Cubist style.

African Art

In another interesting crossover during this era, the Fauves' and Pablo Picasso's circles were both interested in African art. Matisse's travelled to Morocco acquired new ideas about color and pattern that surfaced in works like The Green Line (Portrait of Madame Matisse) (1905) and Blue Nude (Souvenir of Biskra) (1907), with their radically simplified features and angular limbs inspired by African sculpture. This use of non-Western artistic sources also had a profound influence on the younger Picasso; he began to incorporate African and Iberian masks into his own work, including in a number of self-portraits and in the iconic Les Demoiselles d'Avignon (1907).

By 1908 the Fauves were individually venturing in separate directions: Braque began developing Cubism alongside Picasso, Derain briefly flirted with Cubism as well, and de Vlaminck darkened both his palette and subject matter. Meanwhile, other artists in the group, such as Marquet, Dufy, and Rouault, had begun to work in other styles.

Aftermath

Ultimately, the Fauves joined together for a short but highly consequential episode, rather than a fully defined school. Although they never produced a group manifesto outlining their artistic aims, Matisse's "Notes of a Painter," written in 1908, formalized many of their shared concerns and goals, including their commitment to personal expression and individual instinct, their use of color as an independent visual element with an emotional effect, and their rethinking of composition as pictorial surface. Even after the dissolution of the group, nearly as soon as it gained its infamous nickname, Fauvism's ideas and landmark works would continue to influence art for decades to come.

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Fauvism Movement, Artists and Major Works

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"If the trees look yellow to the artist, then painted a bright yellow they must be." Fauvism, the first twentieth-century movement in modern art, was initially inspired by the examples of Vincent van Gogh, Paul Gauguin, Georges Seurat, and Paul Cézanne. The Fauves ("wild beasts") were a loosely allied group of French painters with shared interests.