Summary
Highlights
The early 20th century marked a shift from late 18th-century pessimism to a period of optimism, driven by advancements like automobiles and airplanes. This optimism fostered a desire to expand art's definition into radical styles like Fauvism, Expressionism, and Cubism. This era saw rapid changes and overlapping art movements, with innovation, imagination, and originality becoming central tenets, evolving from the Romanticism period.
Fauves, while connected to Symbolists through literary interests and to Impressionists through a love of nature and leisure, also built upon Post-Impressionist interests in color and emotional qualities. Their core pursuit was personal authenticity in their work, making a concrete, universal style challenging to pinpoint due to its strong ties to individual artists.
Translating to 'wild beast,' Fauvism was named by a critic for its identifying feature: bold, explosive, and arbitrary color. Color became the primary vehicle for self-expression, liberating it from its descriptive role, a concept previously experimented with by artists like Van Gogh and Gauguin. Colors were often pure, directly from the tube, used to convey mood and meaning rather than to delineate form accurately.
Matisse's 'Open Window' (1905) exemplifies early Fauvist characteristics: flat surfaces, non-representational and inconsistent color use, and a diverse range of brushstrokes. Broad, flat zones of color flatten the work, guiding the viewer's eye across the surface rather than drawing them into depth. Unlike traditional Renaissance windows, this 'open window' doesn't create an illusion of deep space but rather emphasizes the painting itself as a separate entity, detached from copying reality.
Matisse's 'Woman in a Hat' (1905) further illustrates Fauvist principles with its large bands of arbitrary, complementary colors and inconsistent brushstrokes. In Fauvism, color, shape, and line operate independently from the subject matter, leading to a non-representational use of color that doesn't define features realistically but serves the artist's expressive intent.