Collection: Fauvism

Fauvism took its name from a critic's reference to wild beasts at the 1905 Paris Salon d'Automne, where Henri Matisse, André Derain, Maurice de Vlaminck, and their associates exhibited canvases of unmixed colour applied at deliberate disregard of descriptive accuracy. The critic Louis Vauxcelles described the room as an orgy of pure tones, and the painters adopted the label.

The principal Fauves were Matisse, Derain, Vlaminck, Albert Marquet, Henri Manguin, Charles Camoin, Othon Friesz, Raoul Dufy, Kees van Dongen, Jean Puy, Louis Valtat, and Émilie Charmy. Georges Braque and Georges Rouault worked through Fauvism before moving toward Cubism and a more sombre Expressionism respectively.

The movement was short, with three principal exhibitions in 1905, 1906, and 1907, and effectively dispersed by 1908. Derain moved toward more classical figure painting, and Vlaminck retreated into a darker Cézannean palette. Matisse alone developed the colour programme through to the great cut-paper compositions of his late career. The brevity of Fauvism is misleading: it set the conditions for almost everything that followed in modern French painting and provided the immediate Continental example that Die Brücke and the Russian avant-garde absorbed.