Text b. Fauvism: Expressive and Violent Colour

Fauvism was a relatively short-lived movement in French painting (from about 1898 to about 1908) that revolutionized the concept of colour in modern art. The fauves rejected the impressionist palette of soft, shimmering tones in favor of the violent colours used by the postimpressionists Paul Gauguin and Vincent van Gogh for expressive emphasis. They achieved a poetic energy through vigorous line, simplified yet dramatic surface pattern, and intense colour.

The Fauvists were not interested in symbolic content – artistic form alone became the means of expression, the means of communication. They were convinced that colour and forms had their own expressive content independent of the model in nature, which was to be developed through the artistic execution.

Les fauves, literally “the wild beasts”, was originally a pejorative label applied to the group at their first exhibition in 1905, although the fauvist style had been employed by the group's members for several years before that date. The artists included André Derain, Maurice de Vlaminck, Raoul Dufy, Georges Braque, Henri Manguin, Albert Marquet, Jean Puy, Emile Othon Friesz, and Henri Matisse, their undisputed leader. The epithet was never accepted by the painters themselves and, indeed, in no way does it describe their sunny or lyrically subjective imagery.

Technically, the fauvist use of colour was derived from experiments made by Matisse at Saint-Tropez in the summer of 1904, working with the neoimpressionist painters who placed small dabs of pure colour side by side to achieve an even more optically correct image than that of the impressionists. Matisse's neoimpressionist pictures, while abiding strictly by the rules, show, beyond a mere recording of optical response, a strong interest in lyrical colour.

In the summer of 1905, Matisse and Derain painted together at Collioure in “a golden light that eliminates shadows”. They began to use pure complementary colours applied in flat, vigorous strokes, achieving an equivalent rather than a description of light. In their high-key colours these pictures dazzle the viewer with Mediterranean sunshine. When a neighboring collector showed them some South Seas pictures by Gauguin, they saw their theories of subjective colour confirmed, and fauvism was born.

Matisse understood the painting as an autonomous organism, in which nature was not reproduced but represented through a pictorial arrangement. He consciously structured the surface as surface, but his paintings show a new kind of space. Zones of colour are played off against one another so that the picture-field contains space: warm and cold colour contrasts mark an advance or retreat of the surfaces, and thus establish a rhythm that suggests volumes. In the depiction of the human figure, on the other hand, the body is often represented in a linear fashion. The ornamental curve of the outline translates physical, three-dimensional sensuality into the form of the surface, and thus achieves a new illustrative dimension. Matisse made the final break with optical colour; a woman's nose could be flat green if it added to the colour composition and expression of the painting. Matisse said, “I do not paint women; I paint pictures”.

The juxtaposition of fine colour shades or radiant complementary contrasts enabled Matisse to achieve a luminescence that allows the painting to radiate from within, and thus created an artificial light within the painting. The paintings have a life of their own. They are not connected to the reality outside of the picture either through the precision of the depiction or through any symbolic reference to that reality. Form and expression have become one. They make an indivisible unit.

Each of the painters experimented with the principles of the style in his own way. By about 1908, however, all had forsaken strict adherence to the mannerisms of a school. With colour firmly established as a personally expressive element of painting, each went his own way.