1. FAUVISM

2. So what is a FAUVE? Let’s look at this work by Andre Derain. It is of his fellow artist, Henri Matisse. What characteristics of previous styles do you see? What is new about this work?

3. ► Parisians were just getting used to the work of a ‘radical group’ called the Impressionists. They used bright colours and loose brushstrokes to capture the effects of light and atmosphere. ► Post Impressionists like Gaugin and Lautrec began to flatten the picture plane and use colour more subjectively. ► Fauvists used colour to express their emotions,simplified shapes and further flattened the picture plane.

4. Fauve painting did not have the concerted and sustained momentum of a coherent movement. The Fauve period lasted only a few years, from about 1904 to 1908. The artists, never formally associated, moved on to work in other styles.

5. Influences Fauve painters were influenced by several Postimpressionist artists, especially Georges Seurat, Paul Gauguin, and Vincent van Gogh. These painters had turned away from the Impressionists' aim of capturing primarily visual effects of light and atmosphere. When Matisse arrived in Collioure in 1904, he had been working in the Neoimpressionist style of Seurat, Paul Signac, and others. Hoping to give scientific rigor to Impressionism, these artists had been experimenting with the use of pure, unmixed colors.

6. Seurat's Seascape illustrates their technique, called pointillism. Applying contemporary colour theory in a rigorous way, the Neoimpressionists juxtaposed tiny individual touches of pure color. They believed that these would blend in the eye to create a full range of colors more vibrant than could be achieved by blending pigments on the palette. (*optical colour mixing) Matisse, though, did not like the way the overall image became muted; the brilliance of the individual colors was lost when viewed at a distance. And he felt the Neoimpressionist reliance on theory was limiting. "My choice of colors does not rest on any scientific theory; it is based on observation, on feeling, on the very nature of each experience."

7. A retrospective of Paul Gauguin's painting had appeared at the 1903 Salon d'automne, While Matisse and Derain were working in Collioure, they were also able to see some of Gauguin's last works in a town nearby. Gauguin used color expressively and symbolically to communicate interior states rather than surface appearances. He urged other painters, "don't copy nature too literally.“ Massing colors into large, flat areas, Gauguin used their inherent emotive qualities to express intangibles.

8. Before traveling to Collioure, Matisse had been chairman of a committee to mount a retrospective exhibition of works by Vincent van Gogh. The younger artist acknowledged that seeing Van Gogh's painting had "encouraged him to strive for a freer, more spontaneous technique, for more intense, more expressive harmonies." For Van Gogh color was powerfully expressive of emotion, and he laid it on the canvas in strong, purposeful marks.

9. Auguste Renoir, Oarsmen at Chatou, 1879 Compare Vlaminck's fauve painting of the river at Chatou with this impressionist view painted by Auguste Renoir some twenty years earlier. Both artists composed their images in a similar manner, but in other respects they differ. Renoir's gaily attired tourists, out for a leisurely day of boating, contrast with Vlaminck's working tug. Renoir's colors are bright complements, but his paint is applied with the subtle touches that make the scene appear scintillating. Like his subject matter, Vlaminck's brushstrokes—almost uniform—are more muscular. Maurice Vlaminck

10. Henri Matisse, 1869 - 1954 ► Henri Matisse was born at Le Cateau-Cambrésis in the North of France on December 31, 1869. His parents, Emile Matisse and Héloise Gérars, had a general store selling household goods and seed. Henri planned on a legal career, and in 1887/88 studied law in Paris, in 1889 he was employed as a clerk in a solicitor’s office. It was in 1890 that he was first attracted to painting. Confined to his bed for nearly a year (1890) after an intestinal operation, he chose drawing as a pastime. Then the hobby took best of him and he decided for the painting career.

11. 1897

12. 1899 1901

13. 1904

14. "Matisse is moving painting in a new direction, toward greater autonomy from the thing depicted. It is surely no accident that he does so with a painting of a window. From the time of the Renaissance, the comparison of a painting to a window was a conceit pointing to the painter's ability to create an illusion of an outside reality. Now the painting asserts its own reality, as color and form.

15. An Open Window Open Window, Collioure is among the very first fauve works. It was painted during the summer of 1905, when Matisse, together with André Derain, worked in the small Mediterranean fishing port of Collioure, near the Spanish border. When I put a green, it is not grass. When I put a blue, it is not the sky. ——Matisse The view is full of light, inviting and vibrant. Through the window, small boats bob on pink waves under a sky banded with turquoise, pink, and periwinkle. This scene, reflected in the glass, melts into rectangles of smeary green, watery cyclamen, and lilac. The surrounding walls are fuchsia and blue- green——these are hardly the colors of nature.

16. Matisse was composing paintings, not just painting things. Color was how he conceived and structured his image. It does not simply convey what he saw——the boats, the vine growing around the balcony, the window panes——but is also decorative pattern in its own right.

17. The Wild Beasts Paris, 1905. Henri Matisse, age thirty- six, has just arrived from the South of France with fifteen new paintings, including this one. Finally, he is pleased with his work. But when he submits the canvases to the Salon d'automne, the season's major public art event, the Salon president——fearing for Matisse's reputation—— tries to dissuade him.

18. ► Les Fauves (French for The Wild Beasts) were a short- lived and loose grouping of early 20th century Modern artists whose works emphasized painterly qualities and strong colour over the representational or realistic values retained by Impressionism.FrenchModern artistspainterlyrepresentationalrealisticImpressionism ► While Fauvism as a style began around 1900 and continued beyond 1910, the movement as such lasted only three years, 1905–1907, and had three exhibitions. The leaders of the movement were Henri Matisse and André Derain.Henri Matisse André Derain

19. Andre Derain

20. ► The artists shared their first exhibition at the 1905 Salon d'Automne. The group gained their name, after critic Louis Vauxcelles described their show of work with the phrase "Donatello au milieu des fauves!" ("Donatello among the wild beasts"), contrasting the paintings with a Renaissance-type sculpture that shared the room with them.Salon d'AutomneLouis VauxcellesDonatelloRenaissance

21. Matisse and colleagues, including André Derain, Maurice de Vlaminck, and Albert Marquet, persevere, and their paintings are hung in Room 7. The public jeers at the "orgy of pure colors," judging the works primitive, brutal, and violent. The artists are dubbed "fauves"——wild beasts. Room 7 becomes "le cage." The term fauve, actually coined by a generally sympathetic critic, has stuck. It describes a style that, while short-lived, was the first avant-garde wave of the twentieth century. The jeering audiences in Room 7 got an early look at what the century would bring.

22. The saturated colors of fauve paintings——all created between about 1904 and 1908——were not descriptive of nature. The paintings' bold strokes had an autonomous existence that often had little to do with mimicking surface appearances. The colors were unblended, without the subtle shading that suggests three-dimensionality. Their very brilliance and the strong rhythms of the brushstrokes worked against any perception of depth.

23. Andre Derain, Turning Road, 1906

24. Derain

25. This view of Collioure is one Derain made while working together with Matisse in the summer of 1905. Derain describes the trees and grass with long strokes of pure color compare them to the strong, twisted lines Van Gogh used for his ancient olive trees. For both Derain and Matisse, however, color was a less emotional, less personal imperative than it had been for Van Gogh.

26. These were paintings on the edge of abstraction. They negotiated new, unstable territory——were they essentially flat, patterned surfaces or a "window" onto the world? Fauve pictures stand at the border between pictorial illusion and the kind of "pure paint" that would become a preoccupation of twentieth-century modernism. As Matisse later observed, "Fauve painting is not everything, but it is the foundation of everything."

27. André Derain, Charing Cross Bridge, London, 1906 The fauves benefited from the scandalous 1905 Salon d'automne. In a burgeoning market for modern art visibility was key, and everyone knew the "wild beasts." Dealers bought up fauve paintings. Derain was sent to London by his dealer Ambroise Vollard. Vollard particularly wanted Derain to paint some of the same subjects that had occupied impressionist Claude Monet only a few years earlier. Derain felt that several of his London paintings were his most successful fauve works.

28. Maurice de Vlaminck Tugboat on the seine Chatou, 1906 Matisse was deliberate and reserved, the opposite of wild. But Maurice de Vlaminck did match the public perception of what fauve painting represented: rebellion, roughness, disorder. A big, muscular man, Vlaminck raced bicycles, wrote racy novels, played the violin loudly, and embraced anarchy: "What I could have done in real life only by throwing a bomb...I tried to achieve in painting." He cultivated the fauve myth. Vlaminck was a self-taught artist. Like Derain he lived in Chatou, a suburb of Paris, and the two often painted there together. Vlaminck's work exploded with bold new color and brushwork after he saw the paintings Matisse and Derain brought back from Collioure in 1905.

29. Georges Braque, The Port of La Ciotat, 1907 While the public ridiculed the fauves, several critics were more appreciative, and some young artists found the new works thought-provoking and exciting. One of those was Georges Braque, who had been pursuing a conservative, impressionist style. The Salon d'automne exhibition changed his art. Although Braque worked in the fauve style only briefly—about two years—he credited it as the step he needed to find his own way as an artist. This view, like Derain's and Matisse's, was made in the warm light of the South of France. La Ciotat was a port and shipbuilding center near Marseilles.

30. Matisse in Nice

31. 1905 ► Matisse

32. Henri Matisse, Pianist and Checker Players, 1924 Matisse -sought harmony through color and delighted in the brilliance of Mediterranean light. This is one of many paintings Matisse made in Nice, where he stayed for the winter months throughout the 1920s. After the Fauve period, Matisse returned to his earlier interest in the human figure—often in interior scenes, often incorporating views through windows.

33. Le Bonheur de Vivre, 1905 -06

35. Matisse, Harmony in Red, 1908-1910

36. 1897

37. Matisse, The Red Studio, 1911

38. Matisse The Figure

39. 1900

40. Matisse, Dance, 1910

42. 1912

43. 1916

44. 1925

45. Matisse in Vence

47. Henri Matisse, Beasts of the Sea, 1950, paper collage on canvas, In the last fifteen years of his life Matisse produced paper works by "cutting into color," as he said. These shapes, cut freehand and later glued onto a background, seem at once calm and dynamic.