Word: fauvism
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...astonishing thing about Russian art of this period is its sustained inventiveness. Artists who based their work on the available prewar styles of avant-garde art - mainly Fauvism, cubism and futurism -were able to digest and develop them with tremendous speed and urgency, leaping beyond their prototypes like pole vaulters. To see this at work, one need only look at the development of Vladimir Tallin's sculpture after his first contact with Picasso's tin cubist Guitar, 1912, in Paris, or at the conviction with which Kasimir Malevich moved from cubism to a purely abstract painting...
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...
...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...