Fauvism for beginners: the wild beasts of color

How to read the labels Historical what the old sources say. Later tradition what later writers added. Modern modern practice and my own notes.

In the autumn of 1905, visitors to the Salon d’Automne in Paris walked into a room that seemed to be on fire. Faces had green shadows. Trees were red. Roads were purple. The painters, Henri Matisse, André Derain, Maurice de Vlaminck and their friends, had decided that color did not have to copy nature. It could simply be felt. A critic called them fauves, wild beasts, and art has never been quite as polite about color again. The group lasted only a few years, but its lesson spread from Paris to Dresden, Munich and Moscow within a decade.

Three layers

Historical What the works and records show. Later tradition The legends. Modern How we use color today.

The cage of wild beasts

Historical Matisse, Derain and others had been working through Post-Impressionism: Van Gogh’s strokes, Gauguin’s flat color, Seurat’s dots. In the summer of 1905 Matisse and Derain painted together in the fishing port of Collioure, near the Spanish border, and pushed color as far as it would go. At the Salon, the critic Louis Vauxcelles saw a small classical sculpture in the middle of their room and joked about “Donatello among the wild beasts”.

Matisse

Historical Henri Matisse (1869 to 1954) had studied with the Symbolist Gustave Moreau. His Woman with a Hat (1905), now in the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, shows his wife Amélie with a face streaked green and violet under an enormous hat. Visitors laughed. The American collectors Leo and Gertrude Stein bought it. In 1908 Matisse wrote that he dreamed of “an art of balance, of purity and serenity”, something like a good armchair for a tired mind. He went on to a long career of color and pattern, ending with paper cut-outs made when illness kept him from painting. I describe his works in words here, because I could not find a public domain image file of the right quality; the museum websites show them well.

Derain in London

André Derain, Charing Cross Bridge, London, 1906. National Gallery of Art, Washington. Image: Wikimedia Commons, public domain.

Historical In 1906 the dealer Ambroise Vollard sent André Derain to London to paint the city, as Monet had done a few years before. Monet’s Thames was fog and pearl. Derain’s Charing Cross Bridge is blue, orange, green and pink, the water broken into bright tiles of color. It is the same river seen by a completely different temperament.

Color and the brain

Historical The Fauves built on color theory from Chevreul to the Neo-Impressionists, and on the experience of the Mediterranean sun. Their colors are not random. Complementary pairs, red against green and orange against blue, make each other vibrate.

The esoteric angle

Historical Fauvism has little direct esoteric content, and I will not invent any. But Derain and Vlaminck were among the first Paris artists to collect African masks around 1905 and 1906, and Matisse’s teacher Moreau had been a leading Symbolist. The idea that color acts on us directly, without a story, was in the air, and Kandinsky would soon make it spiritual.

Later tradition Matisse’s late chapel at Vence (1949 to 1951), with its stained glass of yellow, green and blue, is often described as a place of quiet light. That is how visitors experience it; Matisse called it the result of a lifetime of work.

Modern Color magic, from candle colors to altar cloths, is the most Fauve part of a witch’s practice. See Candle colours.

Try it yourself

Find Derain’s Charing Cross Bridge and one of Monet’s London paintings of the Thames online. Write down the three main colors in each. Then paint or color a view from your own window twice: once in its real colors, once in colors that show how you feel about it.

Before and after

Before this: Arts and Crafts.

After this: Expressionism.

See every movement in order on the art movements timeline, or learn to look step by step in the free Art History for Beginners course.