Word: fauvism
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What's in a name? Not much, the historian of art is bound to answer. Cubism was not about cubes, nor Fauvism about wild beasts. When in 1905 an affable critic looked round the Paris Salon d'Automne, which contained an Italianate bust surrounded by the paintings of Henri Matisse and his disciples, he made a wisecrack about "Donatella chez les fauves" (Donatello among the wild beasts), thus giving a short-lived movement a very durable and misleading label. Fauvism was worked out by a small group of artists over a span of three years; it was dead...
...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...
Nevertheless, Fauvism (much helped by its name) is conventionally taken as the first modern art movement-"modern" because scandalous to the bourgeois of 1905. Its explosive nature has been much strummed upon, but we do not see enough of the paintings themselves. How do they look now, 70 years later? A splendid exhibition at New York's Museum of Modern Art, sponsored by SCM Corporation and the National Endowment for the Arts, supplies the means to an answer. The museum's curator of painting and sculpture, John Elderfield, has assembled 114 works by 22 artists under the title...
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...
Like Marcel Duchamp, Villon and the futurists, Kupka seized the threat by the horns, using photographs to revise his practice as a painter. In a figure painting entitled Planes by Colors, Large Nude, 1909-10, Kupka had taken the un inhibited color of Fauvism and given it a dense, architectural solidity (it seems right that the model's pose, monumental as it is, should mimic that of Michel angelo's Leda). The problem was now to set those planes in motion; for that, Kupka resorted to one of the great novelties of the time, the high-speed sequential...