The Fauves’ colour carried optimism within it in contrast to that of their German Expressionist contemporaries. To them, one thing that remained unshakeable in painting was that it was born out of life and reflected life which was its true source. “The goal we set ourselves is happiness, a happiness which consequently we should create,” Derain said.[21] In order to create it, one must have a love of life itself, be endowed with that “Flemish sense of joy” which Apollinaire found in Vlaminck’s painting.[22] “I love life more than anything,” Jean Puy bashfully confessed.[23] He was boldly seconded by Van Dongen: “Oh! Life. It is perhaps even more beautiful than painting.”[24]
It was just this irrepressible striving after joy which attracted them to the work of Auguste Renoir. It is evident that Renoir’s influence was not only on individual Fauves, but also on the movement as a whole. This fact has not been fully appreciated. Nevertheless, it was in him, not yet as distant in time as the works in museums, that they found the qualities which in their totality comprised the core of the visual expression of Fauvism: joie de vivre and the triumph of the element of colour.
At the start of the century the Fauves were the first to proclaim preference for the intuitive course in painting; the power of the painterly element over the artistic, as one of the inseparable qualities of the freedom after which they were striving. Even the most rational of them – Matisse, who was most inclined to make experiments in painting on a par with scientific research – asserted: “It is through colour that I feel.”[25]
Henri Matisse, Statuette and Vases on Oriental Carpet or Still Life in Red of Venice, 1908.
Oil on canvas, 89 × 104 cm.
Pushkin State Museum of Fine Arts, Moscow.
Henri Matisse, Spanish Still Life, c. 1910–1911.
Oil on canvas, 89.5 × 116.3 cm.
State Hermitage Museum, Saint Petersburg.
Henri Matisse, Still Life with ‘The Dance’, 1909.
Oil on canvas, 89.5 × 117.5 cm.
State Hermitage Museum, Saint Petersburg.
Despite its many-layered complexity, Fauvism had an entirely definite orientation. Cubism, which appeared alongside after an interval of two years, not only overshadowed Fauvism, but also placed both phenomena in a definite position in the general historical succession. Cubism appeared as a variety of Classicism, superseding the Romanticism of the Fauves. Both these currents continued to flow in parallel, gathering strength in turns, overtaking one another, changing in form but retaining their essence. Not one of the Fauves called himself a Romantic. Nevertheless, the paintings produced by the majority of them make it possible to relate their work to the Romantic tendency, to the line of Delacroix, whom they all valued highly, in contrast to the Cubists, who preferred Jean Auguste Dominique Ingres. As regards the terminology being a hangover from the nineteenth century: for the Fauves the concept of “Classicism” had not lost the meaning which it had for the Romantics of the previous age. “I wanted to bring about a revolution in morals, in contemporary life, to show nature at liberty, to free it from the ancient theories of Classicism whose authority I hated as much as that of a general or a colonel,” Vlaminck said.[26] And while in the nineteenth century literature and music formed a single powerful Romantic union, in the new upsurge of Romanticism at the beginning of the twentieth century, it was painting which dominated.
No small part of the significance of Fauvism lies in the fact that, created by young artists at the turn of the century, it became, in turn, a medium that nourished and educated them. Fauvism signified a path of natural development without any kind of force or compulsion. It taught the ability to listen to oneself, to take a pride in what was one’s own, the individual, and to hold firmly to it. Leaving aside the eloquent examples of Matisse and Van Dongen, we must pay tribute to the courage of Dufy, Marquet, Puy, Manguin or Chabaud – their work became the embodiment of precisely that which Vlaminck said in verse: “The nightingale doesn’t sing into the phonograph.”[27]
The range of the Fauves’ creativity is fairly broad, encompassing everything which came into an artist’s field of vision at the beginning of the twentieth century. Although they began as “anti-Nabis,” it was the Nabis who gave the Fauves an interest in applied and graphic art. These spheres had a need for real artists and Matisse’s generation possessed a large stock of energy. The primacy of colour in Fauvist painting prompted the idea of decorative art from the outset. Almost all the Fauves went through a phase of being interested in applied art, but neither Fauvism in general nor the artists themselves lost their individuality.
None of the Fauves overlooked either the graphic arts, beginning with the newspaper and magazine caricatures with which many of them earned money in their youth, through the drawings, watercolours, and gouaches, which naturally accompanied their work throughout their lives, to prints and book illustrations. If one regards Fauvism only as a period of shared enthusiasm for the element of colour, graphic art would seem to have only a fairly tenuous connection with it. As a major phenomenon in the fine arts in general, as a continuation of the tendencies and lines of Romanticism in the twentieth century, Fauvism gave a powerful impulse to all forms of art. Even Derain’s quick pen-and-ink drawings carry in them a sense of vital force and thoroughness characteristic of the “school of Château.” Every one of Marquet’s landscape sketches possesses the constancy, modesty, and restraint which were the hallmark of his painting. Raoul Duty’s prints are sincere and naive. Vlaminck’s wood engravings are spontaneous, unrestrained, and energetic. As far as Matisse’s astonishing line is concerned, immediate and free, yet at the same time precise and thoroughly considered, it was perhaps the very thing which drew the critics’ attention to the particular role drawing played for the Fauves. The book called Jazz (Paris, 1937), which Matisse created at the end of his life, demonstrates in its integrity of conception and unity in the assembling of pictorial means all the qualities of Fauvism with no less force than the painting of his youth.
Henri Matisse, The Dance, 1909–1910.
Oil on canvas, 260 × 391 cm.
State Hermitage Museum, Saint Petersburg.
Henri Matisse, Conversation, 1908–1912.
Oil on canvas, 177 × 217 cm.
State Hermitage Museum, Saint Petersburg.
Henri Matisse, Entrance to the Casbah, 1912–1913.
Right Panel of the Moroccan Triptych.
Oil on canvas, 116 × 80 cm.
Pushkin State Museum of Fine Arts, Moscow.
Henri Matisse, Arab Coffeehouse, 1913.
Tempera on canvas, 176 × 210 cm.
State Hermitage Museum, Saint Petersburg.
Henri Matisse, Portrait of Lydia Delectorskaya, 1947.
Oil on canvas, 64.5 × 49.5 cm.
State Hermitage Museum, Saint Petersburg.
Henri Matisse, Young Woman in