Les Fauves

Vision after the Sermon
Paul Gauguin

Fauvism has its roots in the post-impressionist paintings of Paul Gauguin. It was his use of symbolic colour that pushed art towards the style of Fauvism. Gauguin proposed that colour had a symbolic vocabulary which could be used to visually translate a range of emotions. In 'Vision after the Sermon' where Gauguin depicts Jacob wrestling with an angel, he paints the background a flat red to emphasise the mood and subject of the sermon: Jacob's spiritual battle fought in a blood red field of combat. Gauguin believed that colour had a mystical quality that could express our feelings about a subject rather than simply describe a scene. By breaking the established descriptive role that colour had in painting, he inspired the younger artists of his day to experiment with new possibilities for colour in art.

Les toits de Collioure
Henri Matisse 

At the start of the 20th century, two young artists, Henri Matisse and André Derain formed the basis of a group of painters who enjoyed painting pictures with outrageously bold colours. The group were nicknamed 'Les Fauves' which meant 'wild beasts' in French. Their title was coined by the art critic Louis Vauxcelles who was amused by the exaggerated colour in their art. At the Salon d'automne of 1905 he entered a gallery where Les Fauves were exhibiting their paintings. Surprised by the contrast with a typical renaissance sculpture that stood in the centre of this room, he exclaimed with irony, "Donatello au mileau des fauves!" ( Donatello in the middle of the wild beasts! ). 

Besides Matisse and Derain, other artists included Albert Marquet, Charles Camoin, Louis Valtat, the Belgian painter Henri Evenepoel, Maurice Marinot, Jean Puy, Maurice de Vlaminck, Henri Manguin, Raoul Dufy, Othon Friesz, Georges Rouault, the Dutch painter Kees van Dongen, the Swiss painter Alice Bailly, and Georges Braque (subsequently Picasso's partner in Cubism).

Harlequin and Pierrot 
André Derain 

The paintings of the Fauves were characterised by seemingly wild brush work and strident colours, while their subject matter had a high degree of simplification and abstraction. Fauvism can be classified as an extreme development of Van Gogh's Post-Impressionism fused with the pointillism of Seurat and other Neo-Impressionistpainters, in particular Paul Signac. Other key influences were Paul Cézanne and Paul Gauguin, whose employment of areas of saturated colour—notably in paintings from Tahiti—strongly influenced Derain's work at Collioure in 1905.

La Petite Lina
Charles Camoin

Fauvism was not a formal movement with a manifesto of rules and regulations. It was more an instinctive coming together of artists who wished to express themselves by using bold colours, simplified drawing and expressive brushwork. 'Les Fauves' simply believed that colour had a spiritual quality which linked directly to your emotions and they loved to use it at the highest possible pitch.

Within a few years, Fauvist techniques were adopted and developed by the German Expressionists and their various splinter groups. Fauvism was gradually subsumed into the canon of modern art, but its influence liberated the use of colour for future generations of artists, who ultimately explored colour as an abstract subject in its own right.