Word: fauvism
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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Someone once said that avant-garde movements inevitable lose their momentum, citing Impressionism and the hippie movement as classic examples of his theory. Yet the art of Malet is fortunate: Created in an age so befuddled by every kind of "-ism" from Fauvism to Cubism to Dadaism, and with new fashions developing in geometric progression, it is graced by a label which, while evoking instant recognition (everyone's aunt gushes over "the lovely Impressionist paintings"), does not really set any limits on an artist's self-expression. Impressions pure and simple. Few painters escape the biggest pitfall along this path...
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...
...Life with Pitchers, 1906, would give way to the austerities of cubism. The demands of more legible structure and more com plicated feeling drew Matisse away from the style he had largely invented. As Elderfield notes in the catalogue, "Matisse's ideal voluptuous world only fully emerged when Fauvism had ended, and could only be created by renouncing that part of it he felt to be excessive...
...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...