FAUVISM

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FAUVISM

• Wild Beasts

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Fauvism

• Between 1901 and 1906, several comprehensive
  exhibitions were held in Paris, making the work
  of Vincent van Gogh, Paul Gauguin, and Paul
  Cézanne widely accessible for the first time. For
  the painters who saw the achievements of these
  great artists, the effect was one of liberation
  and they began to experiment with radical new
  styles. Fauvism was the first movement of this
  modern period, in which color ruled supreme.

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Fauvism

• Fauvism, French Fauvisme, style of painting that
  flourished in France from 1898 to 1908 it used
  pure, brilliant color, applied straight from the
  paint tubes in an aggressive, direct manner to
  create a sense of an explosion on the canvas. The
  Fauves painted directly from nature as the
  Impressionists had before them, but their works
  were invested with a strong expressive reaction
  to the subjects they painted.

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Fauvism

• First formally exhibited in Paris in 1905,
  Fauvist paintings shocked visitors to the annual
  Salon d'Automne one of these visitors was the
  critic Louis Vauxcelles, who, because of the
  violence of their works, dubbed the painters "Les
  Fauves" (Wild Beasts).

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Fauvism

• The advent of Modernism if often dated by the
  appearance of the Fauves in Paris at the Salon
  d'Automne in 1905. Their style of painting, using
  non-naturalistic colors, was one of the first
  avant-garde developments in European art. They
  greatly admired van Gogh, who said of his own
  work Instead of trying to render what I see
  before me, I use color in a completely arbitrary
  way to express myself powerfully''.

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Fauvism

• The Fauvists carried this idea further,
  translating their feelings into color with a
  rough, almost clumsy style. Matisse was a
  dominant figure in the movement other Fauvists
  included Vlaminck, Derain, Marquet, and Rouault.
  However, they did not form a cohesive group and
  by 1908 a number of painters had seceded to
  Cubism.

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Fauvism

• Fauvism was a short-lived movement, lasting only
  as long as its originator, Henri Matisse
  (1869-1954), fought to find the artistic freedom
  he needed. Matisse had to make color serve his
  art, rather as Gauguin needed to paint the sand
  pink to express an emotion. The Fauvists believed
  absolutely in color as an emotional force.
  Color lost its descriptive qualities and became
  luminous, creating light rather than imitating
  it.

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Fauvism

• They astonished viewers at the 1905 Salon
  d'Automne the art critic Louis Vauxcelles saw
  their bold paintings surrounding a conventional
  sculpture of a young boy, and remarked that it
  was like a Donatello parmi les fauves'' (among
  the wild beasts). The painterly freedom of the
  Fauves and their expressive use of color gave
  splendid proof of their intelligent study of van
  Gogh's art. But their art seemed brasher than
  anything seen before.

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Fauvism

• The leader of the group was Henri Matisse, who
  had arrived at the Fauve style after careful,
  critical study of the masters of
  Postimpressionism Paul Gauguin, Vincent van Gogh,
  and Georges Seurat. Matisse's methodical studies
  led him to reject traditional renderings of
  three-dimensional space and to seek instead a new
  picture space defined by movement of color.
  Matisse exhibited his famous "Woman with the Hat"
  (SFMOMA) at the 1905 exhibition brisk strokes of
  color--blues, greens, and reds--form an
  energetic, expressive view of the woman. As
  always in Matisse's Fauve style, his painting is
  ruled by his intuitive sense of formal order.

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Fauvism

• Other members of the group included two painters
  from Chatou, France, André Derain and Maurice de
  Vlaminck, who, together with Matisse, formed the
  nucleus of the Fauves. Derain's Fauve paintings
  translate every tone of a landscape into pure
  colour, applied with short, forceful
  brushstrokes.

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Fauvism

• The Fauves represented the first break with the
  artistic traditions of the past. The movement's
  emphasis on formal values and expressive use of
  color, line, and brushwork helped liberate
  painting from the representational expectations
  that had dominated Western art since the
  Renaissance. Fauvism was the first explosive
  20th-century art movement.

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Fauvism

• Fauvism was for most of these artists a
  transitional, learning stage. By 1908 a revived
  interest in Paul Cézanne's vision of the order
  and structure of nature had led them to reject
  the turbulent emotionalism of Fauvism in favour
  of the logic of Cubism. Matisse alone pursued the
  course he had pioneered, achieving a
  sophisticated balance between his own emotions
  and the world he painted.

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Henri Matisse
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Self Portrait with Striped T Shirt 1906
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Henri Matisse

• An artist often regarded as the most important
  French painter of the 20th century. The leader of
  the Fauvist movement around 1900, Matisse pursued
  the expressiveness of color throughout his
  career.

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Henri Matisse

• While studying to become a lawyer, Henri Matisse
  felt the urge to painta feeling that completely
  changed his life. In the exhibition of 1905,
  Matisse exhibited shocking works with the Wild
  Beasts. He used intense colors and simplified
  complex subjects. This ability moved him to the
  forefront of Fauvism and he became spokesperson
  for the group. He wanted to express himself with
  simple color and shape rather than shading and
  perspective.

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Henri MatisseMaster of Color

• Matisse's artistic career was long and varied,
  covering many different styles of painting from
  Impressionism to near Abstraction. Early on in
  his career Matisse was viewed as a Fauvist, and
  his celebration of bright colors reached its peak
  in 1917 when he began to spend time on the French
  Riviera at Nice and Venice. Here he concentrated
  on reflecting the sensual color of his
  surroundings and completed some of his most
  exciting paintings.

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Abstraction

• Abstraction
• Imagery which departs from representational
  accuracy, to a variable range of possible
  degrees, for some reason other than appear to be
  true or real. Abstract artists select and then
  exaggerate or simplify the forms suggested by the
  world around them.

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Henri Matisse

• In 1941 Matisse was diagnosed as having duodenal
  cancer and was permanently confined to a
  wheelchair. It was in this condition that he
  completed the magnificent Chapel of the Rosary in
  Vence.

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Woman with a Hat 1905
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Woman with a Hat 1905

• It is believed that the woman in the painting was
  Matisse's wife, Amelie.
• It was exhibited with the work of other artists,
  now known as "Fauves" at the 1905 Salon
  d'Automne.
• The pictures gained considerable condemnation,
  such as "A pot of paint has been flung in the
  face of the public" from the critic Camille
  Mauclair, but also some favorable attention. The
  painting that was singled out for attacks was
  Matisse's Woman with a Hat, which was bought by
  Gertrude and Leo Stein this had a very positive
  effect on Matisse, who was suffering
  demoralization from the bad reception of his
  work.

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Salon dAutomne, ( French Autumn Salon)
exhibition of the works of young artists held
every fall in Paris since 1903.

• The Salon dAutomne was established as an
  alternative to the conservative official Salon.
  It was also an alternative to the Salon des
  Indépendants, which was liberal but had a
  juryless policy that often led to mediocrity.
  The founders decided to form their own
  organization with the aims of welcoming any
  artist who wished to join, selecting a jury for
  exhibitions by drawing straws from the new
  groups membership, and giving the decorative
  arts the same respect accorded the fine arts.

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Open Window 1905
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Luxury, Calm and Pleasure 1904
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• Green Stripe (Madame Matisse)
• 1905
• In his green stripe portrait of his wife, he has
  used color alone to describe the image. Her oval
  face is bisected with a slash of green and her
  coiffure, purpled and top-knotted, juts against a
  frame of three jostling colors. Her right side
  repeats the vividness of the intrusive green on
  her left, the mauve and orange echo the colors of
  her dress. This is Matisse's version of the
  dress, his creative essay in harmony.

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Green StripeMadame Matisse

• Matisse painted this unusual portrait of his wife
  in 1905. The green stripe down the center of
  Amélie Matisse's face acts as an artificial
  shadow line and divides the face in the
  conventional portraiture style, with a light and
  a dark side, Matisse divides the face
  chromatically, with a cool and warm side. The
  natural light is translated directly into colors
  and the highly visible brush strokes add to the
  sense of artistic drama.

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The Conversation 1909

• Matisse's Fauvist years were superseded by an
  experimental period, as he abandoned
  three-dimensional effects in favor of
  dramatically simplified areas of pure color, flat
  shape, and strong pattern. The intellectual
  splendor of this dazzlingly beautiful art
  appealed to the Russian mentality, and many great
  Matisses are now in Russia. One is The
  Conversation (1909 177 x 217 cm (5 ft 9 3/4 in x
  7 ft 1 1/2 in)) in which husband and wife
  converse. But the conversation is voiceless.

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The Conversation 1909
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The Dance 1910
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The Dance 1910

• It was one of two monumental panel pictures
  created by the artist in 1910 for his principal
  patron, the Russian businessman Sergei Schukhin,
  who originally hung them on the staircase of his
  mansion in Moscow. Together with its companion
  piece, Music, the work can now be seen in the
  State Hermitage Museum in Leningrad.

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The Dance

• I like dance very much, Matisse said,
  explaining the genesis of this stark and brightly
  coloured depiction of naked, convulsively
  cavorting figures. Dance is an extraordinary
  thing life and rhythm. It is easy for me to live
  with dance. When I had to compose a dance for
  Moscow , I had just gone to the Moulin de la
  Galette on a Sunday afternoon.

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The Dance

• And I watched the dancing. I especially watched
  the farandole (a dance accompanied by pipe and
  tabor_ This farandole was very gay. The dancers
  hold each other by the hands, they run across the
  room, and they wind around the people who are
  standing around Back at home, I composed my
  dance on a canvas of four meters, singing the
  same tune that I had heard at the Moulin de la
  Galette, so that the entire composition and all
  the dancers are in harmony and dance to a single
  rhythm.

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The Red Studio 1911

• Matisse gets his place in the timeline of
  painting because of his use of color. He did
  things with color no-one had before, and
  influenced many artists who followed. Matisse's
  Red Studio is important for its use of color and
  its flattened perspective, his altering of
  reality and our perception of space.

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The Red Studio

• Matisse didn't get the perspective "wrong", he
  painted it the way he wanted it. He flattened the
  perspective in the room, and altered it from how
  we perceive perspective with our eyes.
• The question of getting perspective "right"
  applies only if you're trying to paint in a
  realist style, that is to create an illusion of
  reality and depth in a painting. If that's not
  your aim, then you can't get the perspective
  "wrong". And it's not that Matisse didn't know
  how to get it "right" neither he just chose not
  to do it that way.

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Chapel of the Rosary

• The Chapelle du Rosaire de Vence (Chapel of the
  Rosary), often referred to as the Matisse Chapel
  or the Vence Chapel, is a small chapel built for
  Dominican nuns in the town of Vence on the French
  Riviera. It was built and decorated between 1949
  and 1951 under a plan devised by Henri Matisse.
  It houses a number of Matisse originals and was
  regarded by Matisse himself as his "masterpiece."
  While the simple white exterior has drawn mixed
  reviews from casual observers, many regard it as
  one of the great religious structures of the 20th
  century.

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Three Great Murals

• For the walls, Matisse designed three great
  murals to be made by painting on white tiles with
  black paint and then firing the large sections of
  tile. Each tile measures 12 in.2. Matisse was so
  crippled with ailments by this time that he could
  only work from a wheelchair, and he had a long
  stick with a brush strapped to his arm and pieces
  of construction paper placed on the wall. He then
  drew the images, which were transferred to tiles
  by skilled craftsmen.

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The Fall of Icarus 1943
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Anfitrite 1947
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Le Gerbe 1953
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Matisses Paper Cuts

• During the last fifteen years of his life, Henri
  Matisse developed his final artistic triumph by
  "cutting into color." The drama, scale, and
  innovation of Matisse's rare and fragile papiers
  coupes (paper cutouts) remain without precedent
  or parallel. His technique involved the freehand
  cutting of colored papers into beautiful shapes,
  which he then pinned loosely to the white studio
  walls, later adjusting, recutting, combining, and
  recombining them to his satisfaction.

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Matisses Paper Cuts

• The result created an environment that
  transcended the boundaries of conventional
  painting, drawing, and sculpture. Later, the
  shapes were glued to large white paper
  backgrounds for shipping or display. This group
  of cutouts represents one of the largest
  concentrations of these important works
  worldwide.

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