Word: colorful
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...Sensation. The textbook characteristics of Fauvism are familiar enough: the bright, dissonant color, the crude urgency of surface, the distorted drawing and the love of brisk, apparently raw sensation. But there was no unifying doctrine, as with surrealism, nor even a strong common practice, such as the cubists found. "One can talk about the impressionist school," the Dutchman Van Dongen later remarked, "because they held certain principles. For us there was nothing like that; we merely thought their colors were a bit dull...
...from Baudelaire's L 'Invitation au voyage: "There, all is order and beauty/Luxury, calm and sensuous pleasure." No effort can restore its lost shock value, and this, in a different way, is true of the Derain as well. Today we luxuriate in its weighty design and audacious color, the blaring vermilion tree trunks, the complex blues in the caves of shadow, the pyrotechnics of green and yellow in the foliage. One moves into the work without strain; it is not an Arcadia, but a place well removed from the realities of industrial and urban Europe...
Tricolors and Parasols. This sim ple optimism, underlying the aggressive color, is the main difference between Fauvism and expressionism. Every where one turns in this show, pleasure is celebrated: the tricolores and red, white and blue parasols in Raoul Dufy's street scenes, the rosy theatrical vigor of Van Dongen's scene of a couple out side a brothel. The Hussar (Liverpool Night House), 1906, the slapdash but infectious ebullience of Vlaminck's still lifes. The best sight of all, though, is Matisse inventing the Mediterranean; it is amazing to find how deeply one's images...
...liberation of color achieved by the Fauves was of large but finite consequence: Fauvism was not a style that could be developed. The phlegmatic Georges Braque observed, "You can't remain forever in a state of paroxysm...
After 1908 Derain pruned his color to achieve more weighty and old-masterly effects, and was never to regain the same energy. Vlaminck plummeted into coarse self-parody, Dufy tended more and more to crank out pretty little furniture-pictures, and Van Dongen simply fell apart, becoming-in his meaningless virtuosity and appeal to cafe society-an Andy Warhol with red corpuscles. The brief moment of Fauvism was over; naturally, since it was synonymous with youth itself...