Fauvism

1905: the cage of wild beasts

Fauvism went public at the Salon d'Automne of 1905, in the Grand Palais, where a room of canvases by Henri Matisse, André Derain and their friends blazed with colour that described nothing: red trees, green-striped faces, oranges and violets doing the work of light. The critic Louis Vauxcelles, spotting a conventional sculpture amid the paintings, wrote that it was like Donatello among the wild beasts — Donatello parmi les fauves — and the insult named the movement.

Matisse's Woman with a Hat, its face patched in greens and mauves, took the worst abuse and made the deepest impression; Gertrude and Leo Stein bought it off the scandalous wall.

The summer that made it: Collioure, 1905

The style was forged the summer before, in the Catalan fishing port of Collioure, where Matisse invited Derain to work beside him. In four months of shared experiment they pushed colour past description — pure vermilions, pinks and viridians straight from the tube, laid in broken strokes that owe a debt to the pointillists but refuse their system.

Back in Paris, Maurice de Vlaminck's van Gogh-fuelled landscapes joined theirs, along with work by Georges Braque, Raoul Dufy, Kees van Dongen and others: a loose band of friends rather than a doctrine, with no manifesto and no rules beyond colour first.

Three years, then everything after

As a movement, Fauvism barely outlived the decade. By 1908 Braque had followed Cézanne toward what became Cubism, Derain darkened and ordered his palette, and Matisse went on alone into the sustained colour that filled the rest of his career. Nothing so short has mattered more: Fauvism was the first of the twentieth century's avant-garde movements, and every later liberation of colour — Expressionism in Germany above all — starts from that 1905 room.