Henri Matisse, Nude, Black and Gold, 1908.
Oil on canvas, 100 × 65 cm.
State Hermitage Museum, Saint Petersburg.
Henri Matisse, Seated Woman, 1908.
Oil on canvas, 80.5 × 52 cm.
State Hermitage Museum, Saint Petersburg.
Henri Matisse, Nude, Study, 1908.
Oil on canvas, 60.5 × 50 cm.
State Hermitage Museum, Saint Petersburg.
Henri Matisse, Girl with Tulips, 1910.
Oil on canvas, 92 × 73.5 cm.
State Hermitage Museum, Saint Petersburg.
Henri Matisse, Woman in Green, 1909.
Oil on canvas, 65 × 54 cm.
State Hermitage Museum, Saint Petersburg.
We can extend the picture – and this unique combination of brilliant personalities already in itself becomes one of the characteristics of Fauvism. With this range of characters, artistic and purely human, for all the highly subjective approach each of them had to evaluating life and art, we nevertheless find in their comments a unity and a certainty with regard to the value of certain characteristics which they jointly acquired. It not only forces us to listen to the creators of Fauvism, but in all probability in doing so we will also find the answer to the question of what the movement as a whole was about.
The Fauves became the only association of artists in the history of art to join together in order to protest their right to work without any sort of common program, declaring their program to be complete freedom for each individual personality, complete creative independence both from any theoretical direction and from their like-minded friends.
The turn of a century seems a mere symbolic boundary, yet much did indeed change at the dawn of the twentieth century. The international art world of Paris became so motley and varied, so independent with regard to official artistic life and traditional society that the idea of the artist becoming an outcast completely disappeared, faded into the past together with the nineteenth century. Now the right to individuality in art became something that went without saying and there was no longer any need to unite in defence of it. Nevertheless they did unite, despite Vlaminck’s vehement declaration of his dislike of associations, but not in the least so as to “cross a dangerous spot.” They needed to proclaim the creed of individual freedom loudly and that was best done in chorus. Because, if we try to be precise, it must be admitted that they formed neither a school, nor even a group as such. True, they were called Matisse’s group, but that designation appeared in the press only in order to have some way of setting them apart and defining them. There was no group; they never assembled especially to decide common questions. They did not arrange to dine as a group like the Nabis artists. They did not have a regular meeting place in some particular Parisian cafe. They met in each other’s studios, but there was no regularity with regard to who came. In their arguments about art, which were as much chance occurrences as they were natural ones, totally contradictory views were expressed.
Although they were called Matisse’s group, the reason was not the role he played in the organization of the association. He did not dictate a program to anyone and did not oblige anyone to follow in his footsteps. The probable impetus for this was the system of painting which was specifically Matisse’s, the achievement of harmony in painting through the juxtaposition of patches of pure colour. And if a leader needed to be found, the most reliable thing was to let one’s choice settle on the artist whose works betrayed a theoretical basis. That, however, was no more than the view from outside. When we are thinking of the coming together of the Fauves, would it not make more sense to postulate the leadership of “le plus authentique des Fauves”[15] [the most authentic Beasts] – Maurice de Vlaminck who himself declared: “Ce qu’est le fauvisme? C’est moi!”[16] [What is Fauvism? It’s me!] And it was Vlaminck, of all people, who wanted to force others to follow his course, however paradoxical that may sound, since, after all his course was defined as the absolute non-subordination of the painterly element to any rules whatsoever. But Vlaminck was never the head of the group either – on account of his individualism, the very thing which he repeatedly proclaimed and in which, in point of fact, laid the cause of his joining his Fauvist friends.
Henri Matisse, Spanish Girl with Tambourine, 1909.
Oil on canvas, 92 × 73 cm.
State Hermitage Museum, Saint Petersburg.
Henri Matisse, Seville Still Life, c. 1910–1911.
Oil on canvas, 90 × 117 cm.
State Hermitage Museum, Saint Petersburg.
Henri Matisse, Still Life with Blue Tablecloth, 1909.
Oil on canvas, 88.5 × 116 cm.
State Hermitage Museum, Saint Petersburg.
They really did not have a leader, and not in the least because there was no-one among them capable of taking the lead – it simply contradicted the very essence of Fauvism. Perhaps this association of young men was the realization, albeit short-lived, of the Utopian dream of a disinterested collaboration between equals which had more than once been voiced aloud by the most direct and sincere of artists – Van Gogh, Douanier Rousseau, the Georgian naïve painter Niko Pirosmani. Each was left to his own devices, for them there could be no other program; they met any suggestion that something else existed with protest. “We had no doctrine, any of us,” Van Dongen stated. “For the Impressionists you can use the word ‘school’, because they had certain principles. We did not have any; it only seemed to us that their colours were a bit too insipid, that’s all.”[17] In denying the existence of a doctrine. Van Dongen here in fact confirmed a principle important for Fauvism. On the one hand, their painting proceeded directly from that of the Impressionists for whom they felt sincere respect. On the other hand, the Fauves occupied an anti-Impressionist position, just as they were anti-Nabis, as had already been noted by the critics at the time.
The route from the Old Masters to Fauvism, running from the Venetians and Francisco Goya, inevitably passes through Eugène Delacroix. It was no mere chance that contemporary researchers compare Fauvism with Delacroix’s painting,[18] all the more so since the Fauves turned to him in a completely conscious manner. “Delacroix is especially worthy of our efforts and our understanding; he opened the doors of our era,” the young Derain wrote to Vlaminck.[19] Fritz Vanderpyl, a poet from Montmartre, called Fauvism “wild Impressionism.”[20] It is true the Impressionists’ revelation of the possibilities of pure colour, the unconstrained and expressive aspect of texture, were a stage which led to the emergence of the Fauves’ chromatic approach.
Van Gogh, Gauguin, and Cézanne brought painting to a position where accumulated ideas about the possibilities of creating with paints had to be resolved in a flood of new works. And the means of the Fauves protests against being considered Impressionists, the hub in which all their charges against their predecessors were concentrated, became colour, which attained such an intensity and expressive force that all other means faded into the