Fauvism and Cubism: Scandalously Modern

Fauvism and Cubism flourished in the city of Paris in the first decade of the 20th century. Before these movements became significant landmarks in art history, the names chosen by art critics to characterize them were meant to be unfavorable and to minimize the new artistic research presented in the Parisian Salons. Indeed, for the Fauves, their new form of pictorial expression employed bold, non-naturalistic colors and spontaneous brushwork, while the Cubists aimed to represent objects and figures in planes that showed simultaneously different viewpoints. This audacious freedom was considered scandalous as it revolutionized traditional representation of portraiture, landscape, and still-life.

After witnessing the works by Henri Matisse and André Derain at the Salon d’Automne in Paris in 1905, art critic Louis Vauxcelles labeled the artists “les fauves,” or wild beasts, as a marker of their outrageous departure from traditional art. In fact, Fauvism embraced the dissolution of shapes into color inherited from Impressionism and Pointillism and used a lively palette of bright colors. In an effort to search for new formal ways to evoke intensely emotional reactions, these artists emphasized the expressive potential of color and adopted a radically new painterly approach to their subject matter. Among those artists included in this movement are Derain, Robert Delaunay, Matisse, Maurice de Vlaminck, and Louis Valtat.