The Fauves. Nathalia Brodskaya

Matisse, Path in the Bois de Boulogne, 1902.

      Oil on canvas, 65 × 81.5 cm.

      Pushkin State Museum of Fine Arts, Moscow.

      The Salon des Indépendants, which opened on 24 March 1905, can be reckoned the first real display of Fauvist painting as a fully-formed phenomenon and was truly triumphal: one hundred works by fourteen artists, each of whom became a prominent figure in Fauvist painting!

      The group had grown in size by comparison with the previous year and the two new members who joined not only intensified the radiance of what already existed, but also injected some brilliant and original talent into it. After a century has gone by, it is hard to imagine whether without them the group of Fauves could have produced the bombshell in European art that was their emergence in 1905. The two figures in question are André Derain and Maurice de Vlaminck, two friends from the Paris suburb of Chatou who had become acquainted with Matisse as early as 1901 but had never before exhibited with him.

      Despite all that has been said, the Fauves were not recognized as a group in the spring of 1905. Naturally, the critic Roger-Marx cited the names of many of them together with highly sympathetic appraisals of their painting, showing respect for free manifestations of individuality, but his tastes were for art of a more customary kind, with clear links to Classical tradition. Due to this, Fauvism was not yet seen as a whole.

      The outlines of the new trend in general, and Fauvism in particular, emerge far more tangibly in the critical comments of those hostile to the Salon des Indépendants. First and foremost they were anarchists striving after the free expression of their individuality, taking a stand against tradition and generally accepted standards of beauty. Colour prevails over the rules of craftsmanship in their paintings, more than that, colour intoxicates them and the paints boil on their canvases. Even the immediate sources of their art become clear against the background of this Salon’s retrospectives. Even the idea of “wildness” had already been raised when it was applied to Van Gogh, but a single step remained before it was applied to the younger generation.

      Why was Fauvism not distinguished as a phenomenon and given its name here, at the Salon des Indépendants? Suffice it to say that in 1905, 4,269 works were on display, representing 669 artists, twice as many exhibits and exhibitors as the year before. How would the standard-sized canvases of young artists be noticed as the chief quality of which – colour – required light above all things for its effect!

      As a result, the display by an already completely formed group of a large number of works of what was fully-fledged Fauvist art at the 1905 Salon des Indépendants turned out to be no more than a dress rehearsal for the spectacle which took place a few months later at the Salon d’Automne. Little, it would seem, could have changed in that brief interval, nevertheless in the autumn the art of the “wild men” first made a real impact. Above all, the Salon d’Automne was truly their exhibition. As a result of the change of membership which took place in 1905, the committee now included, among many others, Matisse, Rouault, Roger-Marx, Vauxcelles and, as proved highly important, a loyal friend and pupil of Gustave Moreau – Georges Desvallières, who became vice-president of the Salon. Evidence of the growing authority of the Salon d’Automne can be found in the scale of the exhibition in 1905: it was enormous – 1,625 works (although still three times less than the Salon des Indépendants). Matisse’s group was represented by a smaller number of artists than at the Salon des Indépendants.

      First the dress rehearsal had given each of them the opportunity to understand that there were those close by who shared their ideas and that, taken together, their art acquired an impressive power – something the critics may have missed, but not the artists. United by common tastes and strivings, they, without being aware of it themselves, influenced each other, especially if we bear in mind that some of them had worked together previously.

      André Derain, Martigues (Harbour in Provence), 1913.

      Oil on canvas, 141 × 90 cm.

      State Hermitage Museum, Saint Petersburg.

      André Derain, Landscape with a Boat by the Bank, c. 1915.

      Oil on canvas, 100 × 65 cm.

      State Hermitage Museum, Saint Petersburg.

      André Derain, Path in the Forest of Fontainebleau, 1911.

      Oil on canvas, 92 × 65 cm.

      Pushkin State Museum of Fine Arts, Moscow.

      André Derain, The Old Bridge, c. 1910.

      Oil on canvas, 73 × 92 cm.

      Pushkin State Museum of Fine Arts, Moscow.

      Even more significant was the place they occupied at the exhibition of the Salon d’Automne. In memory of Moreau, Desvallières decided to bring his pupils together – the post of vice-president gave him great opportunities. And that is how the hall appeared, in which side by side were displayed canvases by Matisse, Marquet, Valtat, Manguin, Camoin, and probably also Matisse’s friend, Jean Puy.

      Two writers with attitudes toward the Fauves, which were poles apart, recognized them as a distinct group. Camille Mauclair acknowledged nothing which came after Impressionism, contemptuously called them all artists of the class of Ambroise Vollard, thinking of the “vulgar” tastes of the dealer who had presented Gauguin’s work to the Parisian public.[5] While Maurice Denis, the Nabis artist, referred to them as Matisse’s group which seemed to him “the most lively, most new and most controversial.”[6] The layout of the exhibition not only united the Fauves’ painting – at one and the same time, it set it in opposition to everything else which appeared at the Salon d’Automne.

      Without doubt, the contrast with the surroundings was intensified to the highest degree by the fact that they took the stage in closed ranks. Matisse, Derain, and Vlaminck were supported by Valtat charmed by the scorching Mediterranean sun, conveying the dazzling brilliance of the Bay of Anthéor, sharp shadows on yellow sand alongside an improbably blue sea, Manguin with landscapes of his beloved south, and even the restrained Marquet. Their painting brought out the very thing inherent in the medium: the capacity of oil paints to set in pastose clots or to spread in a thin layer making it possible for one colour to penetrate into another without losing its purity and resonance in the process. They were united by a genuine, feverish delight in the possibilities offered by a bare canvas and tubes of oil paint – one needs no more than to see Kees van Dongen’s Red Dancer and Maurice Vlaminck’s Barges on the Seine alongside each other. “In the orchestra I was conducting,” Vlaminck wrote in his old age, I decided in order to be heard to use only the trumpets, the cymbals, the bass drum, which, in this sphere of work, meant tubes of paint. Just as I would have instructed the musicians to blow the saxophone, cornet, and slide trombone with all their might, I made the tubes of paint burst upon my canvas and used nothing but vermilions, chromes, greens, and Prussian blue to snarl out what I wanted to say.[7]

      Mockery and insults came from the most varied quarters and expressed themselves in different words, but the meaning boiled down to the same: the Fauves’ art was daubing, which had nothing in common with painting; it was denied a place among the creations of normal people and was thus worthy only to be the butt of malicious laughter. One of the critics, J. B. Hall, reviewing the source of the scandal defined the Fauvist hall at the exhibition as the focus “of pictorial perversion, of colour-madness, of the unspeakably bizarre fantasies of people who, if they are not mystificators, deserve the remedial regime of the École.”[8]

      In contrast to the Impressionists or Manet, the Fauves belonged to the new twentieth-century generation – mockery and insults did not hurt them, quite the opposite, they received them with satisfaction as a sign of the start of the battle they intended to wage. In

5

C. Mauclair. «La Peinture et la sculpture au Salon d’automne», L’Art décoratif, 1905, p. 222.

6

Quoted from: M. Giry, «Le Salon d’automne de 1905», L’Information d’histoire de l’art, 1968, vol.1, p. 21.

7

Quoted from: Ch. Chassé, Les Fauves et leur temps, Lausanne-Paris, 1963, p. 115.

8

Quoted from: J. E. Müller, Le Fauvisme, Paris, 1956, p. 5.