1. Les Fauves: The “Wild Beasts”
of Paris
by Eleanor Pence & Ruby Rehman

2. Explosive Beginnings
 1905 Salon d’Automne in Paris
 All grouped in one room (Salle VII)
 Generally, negative critical response at first.
 “Primitive, brutal and violent”
 “Raving madness, or perhaps, a bad joke”
 “A child playing with its paintbox”
 Name given by critic Louis Vauxcelles
 “Donatello au milieu des fauves”.

3. Why so scandalous?
 In many ways, a major departure from previous
movements
 Bright, “unnatural colors” straight from tube.
 Extremely visible brush strokes
 Colors and lack of shading work against perspective.
 Abstraction - a painting is not meant to show what’s
happening
 A preview of the characteristics of many
movements to come.

4. Influences
 Neo-Impressionist colorists
 Nabis
 Seurat’s Pointillism - share an interest in the use of
color in lending visual intensity
 Van Gogh - Pure colors, strong, visible
brushstrokes
 Later, Cezanne and Gaugin
 Cezanne: Playing with perspective through color
 Gaugin: strong colors, rich contrasts, flat color areas

5. Henri
Matisse:
Open
Window,
Collioure
(1905)

6. Matisse:
Woman
with a
Hat
(1905)

7. Maurice de Vlaminck: Tugboats on the
Seine, Chatou (1906)

8. André Derain
 Unlike the other Fauves, Derain didn’t
start out in Impressionism
 Aim of the painter was to ‘substitute his inner
vision for his perception of the world around him’
 Served in the French military from 1901-1904
 Painted over the course of several visits to
judge light and seasonal changes

9. André Derain: Turning Road at
L’Estaque (1906)

10. André Derain: The Bridge of
Waterloo (1907)

11. Derain’s Ascent to Abstraction
Effect of the Sun on the
Water (1906)
Charing Cross Bridge (1905)

12. What Happened to Fauvism?
 Fauvism’s brief history begs the question: Why
was it so brief?
 Barely unified - mostly a group of painters whose
styles and ideologies coincided for a short time.
 Rejected wild colors and blatant emotions for more
classical techniques…all except Matisse
 Emotional use of color absorbed into German
impressionism
 Its freeing of color for emotions and its refusal to
portray the world as it was had a powerful influence
on later, even more avante-garde movements.