‘We have a need for something that is truer than merely seeing; one must create the world of the power that one does not see’ – this was the goal of Raoul Dufy. Dufy combined the ease of the Impressionists with the colourful splendour of the Fauves. In 1906, he painted Les Affiches à Trouville. The writing on the billboards, a waving flag, and strolling couples depict a cheerful, whirling atmosphere, conveying an essence of a moment. The strong, contradictory colour underscores the charming everyday scene. The paintings from the later part of his career act like decorations, as notations of reality; they exude grace and cheerfulness.
André Derain is one of the first Fauves. He justifiably became famous with his depictions of the Thames from 1905–1906. However, soon thereafter he followed the experiments of the Cubists like Braque and Picasso, but after 1912 took up a more classical style. He became a well-known scene painter for the stage and ballet.
After visiting the Van Gogh exhibit in 1901 at the Galerie Bernheim, Maurice de Vlaminck is said to have uttered the now famous remark: ‘Van Gogh means more to me than father and mother.’ A wide, intense and thick application of paint distinguishes Vlaminck’s paintings. He pressed the paints directly from the tube onto the canvas. His unconventional method of painting marks his signature dynamic whirlwind of colour like no other of the Fauves. The act of painting, as he expressed it, was comparable for him to the act of making love.
Henri Manguin from Paris, Albert Marquet from Bordeaux, Charles Camoin from Marseille, Jean Puy from the vicinity of Lyon, and the four artists from the Channel coast hovered around the three central personalities of Dufy, Derain, and Vlaminck for varying lengths of time throughout their careers. The four Channel coast artists were Georges Braque, Raoul Dufy, Emile-Othon Friesz and Louis Valtat, as well as the only non-Frenchman, the Dutchman Kees van Dongen.
Marquet’s work distinguishes itself through its simplicity and reserve. He painted numerous views of Paris and the Seine, harbour scenes, seaside scenes with strolling people, and scenes of streets decorated with flags. The rivers with its ships, the water surface as a playground for light, and the view from a high vantage point, are the recurring themes of his work. This kaleidoscope of Fauvist virtuosity without the optical unity of a unified style is rooted in the varying backgrounds of the artists. The Symbolism of Gustave Moreau had served Matisse and Marquet as their primary guide. Vlaminck was inspired by pre-Expressionist magazine illustrations. Toulouse-Lautrec inspired Kees van Dongen, and the father of modernist art himself, Paul Cézanne, inspired Derain and Friesz. Yet the spacious, two-dimensional colour painting of Paul Gauguin also influenced them greatly. One should not forget the lasting influence of Japanese coloured woodcuts that had already caught the attention of Gauguin and Toulouse-Lautrec, as well as the aim for compositional simplification, as Manet had already produced in his paintings. Yet, even during the short-lived height of the Fauvism between 1905 and 1907, Braque was already moving in the direction of Cubism.
The colour theory of the Neo-Impressionist Signac, whose theories were espoused in his book, Eugène Delacroix au Néoimpressionisme, published in 1899, was of decisive importance for the development of the colour language of Fauvism. The movement to increase awareness of the new way of seeing also had its origins in medical-physiological findings regarding the human eye, specifically, that the eye, perpetually moving, sends inverted images to the retina which only become properly organised in the brain. Moreover, psychology emphasised that one’s internal disposition has a great affect on the way that we perceive the physical world.
Maurice de Vlaminck, Vue de la Seine, 1905–1906.
Oil on canvas, 54.5 × 65.5 cm.
The State Hermitage Museum, St Petersburg.
Kees van Dongen, Spring, c. 1908.
Oil on canvas, 81 × 100.5 cm.
The State Hermitage Museum, St Petersburg.
Primarily, the painting style of the Fauves was encouraged and influenced by the retrospectives of their role models held since 1901, which earned great attention. These three great painters, Vincent van Gogh, Paul Cézanne and Paul Gauguin, who found new ways of visual expression, also acted as the forefathers of modernist art. The discovery of African sculpture also had a lasting influence. In 1904, Vlaminck brought back a large mask and two statuettes from his travels to the Ivory Coast. Derain was speechless when he saw the white mask, and Picasso and Matisse were also deeply moved.
In 1908, Henri Matisse founded the Académie Matisse. Among his students were the Swedish couple, Isaac Grünewald and Sigrid Hjerten-Grünewald, who later were associated with the Sturm in Berlin. Subsequently, they introduced Fauvism and Expressionism to their own country. The American, Max Weber, was also a student of Matisse and brought Fauvism and Cubism to New York. Among the Germans at the Académie Matisse were Oskar and Marg Moll, Rudolf Levy, Franz Nölken, Hans Purrmann and Friedrich Ahlers-Hestermann. Matisse closed his academy in 1911. Certainly not all artists were deeply moved by the liberating power, impetuousness and emotional painting of the Fauves. Pierre Bonnard, after all, remained an outlier of the movement, as did Maurice Denis and Edouard Vuillard. Early on, Denis recognised the importance of the Fauves, as one can discern from a letter written in 1905. ‘What we have here is a painting style that has been divorced from any coincidence. This painting style is pure painting… What is being done here is the primeval search for the absolute.’
Georges Rouault, who became known as a religious painter, remained something of an artistic loner for his whole life. Only for a short time did he feel that he was loosely associated with the Fauves. His surprisingly heavy and expressive painting style varies significantly from the relaxed cheerfulness of the Fauves, with whom he jointly exhibited in 1905 at the Salon d’Automne. Rouault manner of expression was greatly influenced by his experience as an apprentice with a stained glass maker at age 14. Broad, strong brush strokes, with dark colours are indicative of his paintings, both demarcating and conjoining like the stained glass windows of the Middle Ages, where the lead, for example, joins the individual pieces of coloured glass as ‘construction scaffolding.’ His Expressionism reached its first peak in the years 1905 and 1906. His main themes then were circus figures such as Clown and Box Seats. In later years portraits and religious subjects were the focus of his paintings.
André Derain, Le Château (Cagnes), c. 1910.
Oil on canvas, 87 × 66 cm. Drawings department, The Pushkin Museum of Fine Arts, Moscow.
Albert Marquet, Le Port de Honfleur, c. 1911.
Oil on canvas, 65 × 81 cm. Drawings department, The Pushkin Museum of Fine Arts, Moscow.
Paula Modersohn-Becker and Tranquillity in Worpswede
Fritz Mackensen, Otto Modersohn and Hans am Ende moved in 1889 to the small, undisturbed village of Worpswede bordering the Teufelsmoor north of Bremen. Modelling themselves after the French artists, Camille Corot, Théodor Rousseau and Charles-François Daubigny at the Barbizon school, they created a working and living community. As Otto Modersohn confided in his diary and in similar fashion to his fellow painters in southern Germany, at Dachau, the goal of the Worpswede artists was to put a deep poetic feeling for nature into the painting. Eventually, more young painters, tired of the big cities, joined the artists’ community, such as Fritz Overbeck in 1893, Heinrich Vogeler in 1894 and finally Clara Westhoff and her future husband, the poet Rainer Maria Rilke. An artist colony arose that in the course of time attracted different artists and that to this day welcomes artists of various genres.
These painters, who had fled the traditionalism of the art academies, sought to paint the deep, intimate experience of nature. They sought to paint impressions of nature like the clear light and sunsets over the moor, or the fleeting clouds over the Teufelsmoor. The basic tendency in their painting style was towards