History of Modern Art with Klaire
Explore Modern Art history including Impressionism, Cubism, Surrealism, and other key Modernist art movements. Join artist and educator Klaire Lockheart as she examines famous artists and artwork through a 21st century intersectional feminist lens. Whether you’re an artist, student, or patron of the arts, you will hopefully learn something new about Modern Art.
Fauvism: Where the Wild Beasts Are
Is it a surprise that famous Modernist artists were problematic? Henri Matisse was a prominent Fauvist, but he benefited from French imperialism and he was a big fan of objectifying women. Join Klaire Lockheart as she shares the basics about Fauvism and explains the importance of art history education.
Artists and Artwork: Albert Marque, Henri Matisse (Luxury, Calm and Pleasure; Blue Nude: Memory of Biskra; Woman with a Hat; Odalisque couchée aux magnolias), Vincent van Gogh, Paul Signac, Michelangelo Buonarroti (Night), André Derain (London Bridge), and Maurice de Vlaminck
Additional Topics: Avant-Garde, Impressionism, Postimpressionism, Paris Salon, Packard Group National Exhibition, Autumn Salon, Louis Vauxcelles, Complementary Colors, Colonialism, Ariella Aïsha Azulay (Potential History: Unlearning Imperialism), African Art, Primitivism, Vili People, Orientalism, Odalisques, and Amélie Matisse
Artists and Artwork: Albert Marque, Henri Matisse (Luxury, Calm and Pleasure; Blue Nude: Memory of Biskra; Woman with a Hat; Odalisque couchée aux magnolias), Vincent van Gogh, Paul Signac, Michelangelo Buonarroti (Night), André Derain (London Bridge), and Maurice de Vlaminck
Additional Topics: Avant-Garde, Impressionism, Postimpressionism, Paris Salon, Packard Group National Exhibition, Autumn Salon, Louis Vauxcelles, Complementary Colors, Colonialism, Ariella Aïsha Azulay (Potential History: Unlearning Imperialism), African Art, Primitivism, Vili People, Orientalism, Odalisques, and Amélie Matisse
Transcript
Hello, my friends! I’m so happy you’re joining me for the History of Modern Art with Klaire, an intersectional feminist examination of Modernism. I’m your host Klaire Lockheart, and I hope you’re ready for a “wild” ride! I’m going to introduce you to Fauvism. Whether you’re an artist, student, or you’re curious about Modern Art paintings with unnatural color, you’ve come to the right place.
[Music]
Fauvism was an avant-garde Modern Art movement that lasted from about 1905-1908 in Paris, France. Avant-garde means when something is brand new, radical, and has never previously been done, and there was a fast succession of Modernist movements because each new wave of artists attempted to outdo their predecessors. The Impressionists set off a chain reaction in the 19th century. They did their best to prove they were better than the establishment of the Salon exhibitions and promoted their work as new and rebellious. The Orientalists tried to claim they were better than the Impressionists by incorporating sharp, tiny details in their paintings. Postimpressionism made its debut at the last Impressionist exhibition in 1886 in Paris. Of course the artists in Paris didn’t think art was done evolving, and the next Modern Art movement was born in the early 20th century.
Before I get to Fauvism, let me set the stage. In Paris, the Salon was the most important art exhibition. However, thousands of artists were rejected from the show, and so the Salon des Refusés was established in 1863. This was where the artists who were rejected from the official Salon were able to display their work. This exhibition inspired the Impressionists to start hosting their their own exhibitions separate from the Salon. This is a tradition that still happens to this day. For example, I’ve organized my own group art shows after I grew dissatisfied by the lack of exhibition opportunities available in my region. One of the first group exhibitions I conceived of and organized was Subversive Celebration, which was an international mail-in art show that was displayed at the University of South Dakota. The next group show I organized and curated was the Packard Group National Exhibition in 2020 and again in 2021. I suppose if I keep curating the Packard Group exhibition annually it won’t be new and edgy anymore, but I’m not trying to show up an old art establishment that’s hundreds of years old. I truly am dissatisfied with the lack of exhibition opportunities for artists in South Dakota, and I want to help contemporary artists show their artwork in my community. I am always impressed with the artists I include in my exhibitions, and you can see their work featured on my website klairelockheart.com.
Anyway, the independent art shows in Paris inspired other artists to created their own exhibitions, and they were even able to charge admission. The Salon d’Automne, or “Autumn Salon” in English, was established in 1903, but the important exhibition I want you to remember occurred in 1905. Since I am sharing a lot of French names and terms, I would quickly like to ask for forgiveness when I inadvertently mispronounce something. The 1905 Autumn Salon was the debut of Fauvism! This exhibition featured new work from artists who pushed the limits of what color could do in the Western art world. The artists at this exhibition were positively impacted by the Impressionists and Postimpressionists, and they created compositions that had wild, unnatural colors. They used bold, obvious brushstrokes. When art critic Louis Vauxcelles saw the display, he noticed one realistic looking bust that reminded him of Renaissance sculptures. He declared that sculpture was “Donatello among the fauves.” “Fauve” means “wild beast,” and the name stuck. These Parisian artists who painted with loose, thick, quick brushstrokes of unnatural color became the Fauvists.
The one representational sculpture that reminded the art critic of Renaissance artist Donatello, was created by Albert Marque. The rest of the work was vivid, and even though Louis Vauxcelles said it was wild, he was actually supportive of the movement overall. The unnatural color was shocking to the critic and the audiences who saw it for the first time. The room where this radical, colorful artwork was housed was referred to as the “cage of the wild beasts.”
This artwork was bold, bright, and the artists used unnatural colors. Instead of representing the world around them, the Fauves selected colors to express their feelings. One of the leaders of this movement, Henri Matisse, stated, “My choice of colors does not rest on any scientific theory; it is based on observation, on feeling, on the very nature of each experience.” While the Fauvists were inspired by the Impressionists and the Postimpressionists, they said they rejected color theory in favor of expression. While they proclaimed they didn’t employ color theory, I would argue that they did, but just in a different way than the Postimpressionists. Paul Signac and George Seurat painstakingly painted tiny dots and dashes and relied upon optical mixing to make their paintings. For example, they would use a combination of unblended yellow and red dots to create an orange object. The Fauves didn’t invoke this methodical approach to color theory, but I will assert that they did take advantage of their knowledge of complementary colors to make their hues appear more vivid. Complementary colors are opposites on the color wheel, and when they are placed next to each other, they can make the other seem more vibrant. For instance, this is why orange stands out when it is next to blue.
Artists in early 20th century France thought they were innovative when they used color in a way that didn’t represent the natural world, but I do want to take a moment to point out that the Fauves weren’t the first artists on the planet to apply color this way. Part of the myth of the “genius” of the Modernists is that they were the first to do something. They were trailblazers, and everyone else who adopted their methods were considered derivative. Being labeled as “derivative” in the art world is an insult, and it implies a lack of creativity. However, the Fauves weren’t the first to use unnatural color to depict people or scenes. An example that comes to my mind includes artwork from ancient Egypt. Thousands of years ago, artists from pharaonic times would would make paintings and sculptures of people with unnatural colors. They didn’t always represent what they observed in the world around them. Wesir, whose name is Osiris in Greek, was often depicted with green skin. He was the God of the afterlife and a fertility Deity, and green represented growth and rebirth. I have also seen artwork from India that depicts Shiva and Vishnu with blue skin. While the Fauves may have been convinced that they were the first artists ever to make paintings with unnatural colors, they weren’t. Part of their narrow worldview resulted from the colonialist viewpoints they embraced. They were aware that there was life outside of Paris, but they thought they were the pinnacle of civilization.
Join me after the break to learn more about Henri Matisse, one of the most famous Fauvists.
[Break]
Henri Matisse was one of the many French artists who was born into a wealthy family. Most popular Modernists were cis-het white men, who lived in Paris, who were rich, and had connections. I don’t want to discredit the art they created or downplay the impact these famous artists had, but it is a lot easier to create new and innovative artwork with family and financial support than it is to struggle alone with financial instability. Artists are certainly able to have a greater creative output when they don’t have to spend the bulk of their time working at a separate job to pay the bills and purchase supplies. This was also an era before the age of crippling student debt! If you are a student trying to make ends meet or you’re a person who gets frustrated because you don’t have enough time to devote to your creative outlets, your exasperation is valid. Anyway, Matisse began training as an artist in a traditional way, but after he was introduced to Impressionism and Postimpressionism, it influenced him greatly. Matisse was inspired by Vincent van Gogh and Paul Signac. He bought artwork from artists he admired. Matisse was also influenced by Paul Gaugin, but I want to spend as little time as possible talking about that child molester. Let’s just say that Matisse was influenced by many Postimpressionists.
Matisse read “Eugène Delacroix to Neo-Impressionism” by Paul Signac, who developed and advocated for Pointillism, which is a specific type of Postimpressionism. Color was important to Signac, and Matisse was excited by it. In “Notes of a Painter” Matisse declared, “The chief function of colour should be to serve expression as well as possible.” His paintings included vibrant, vivid, and bright colors. In 1904, Matisse painted Luxury, Calm and Pleasure. This painting is a little over 3 feet tall, it is made out of blobs and dashes of vivid hues, and it is currently at the Musée d’Orsay in Paris. This composition is reminiscent of a mosaic, but instead of tiles the artist used paint. Matisse’s brushstrokes aren’t as meticulous as the those of the Pointillists, but this painting was clearly influenced by the paintings created by Paul Signac and Georges Seurat.
Matisse made many colorful paintings that make it look like he had a lot of fun on vacation. He wrote, “What I dream of is an art of balance, of purity and serenity, devoid of troubling or depressing subject-matter.” Luxury, Calm and Pleasure is divided in half horizontally, and the top portion is the sky, composed of red, pink, green, yellow, and violet plops of unblended paint. The earth is split in half with a diagonal shoreline that goes from the left horizon to the bottom right corner. The water reflects the vivid sky with horizontal brushstrokes of color. The sand on the beach is made of warm colors: red, orange, yellow, and pink. There is a skinny tree near the right of the canvas, and the blue and multi-colored trunk stretches off the picture plane. Matisse included several lounging and languid nude women, which is a reoccurring theme for the artist. The woman standing closest to the tree appears to be pulling her long hair into a high ponytail above her head. Her body is highlighted with yellow paint, but her skin is composed of all the colors of the rainbow applied in blobs. The other women are on the red-ish ground, and they are hopefully sitting on green mats. Either that, or their shadows are green and they will all have a miserable time trying to remove sand from some very delicate crevices. There is also a picnic blanket in the lower left corner with some dishes on it.
In addition to being influenced by the Postimpressionists, the Fauves were influenced by “African art,” and I hope my sarcastic quotation marks were noticeable. While the beneficiaries of French imperialism may have thought they were being worldly and inclusive by acknowledging that they looked at art created by people outside of Europe, it’s hard not to cringe when looking back through a 21st century lens. Africa is a vast continent with thousands of years of history and culture, but these 19th century avant-garde Parisian artists lumped everything together. In her book Potential History: Unlearning Imperialism, Ariella Aïsha Azulay wrote,“The looting of art from Congo, I’ll argue, is not only a significant event in the history of Congo, but also a constitutive moment in the institutionalization of modern art.” I should also mention that during the late 19th century, Leopold II of Belgium was responsible for the deaths of about 10 million Congolese people, and he gave away looted objects to museums, including museums in the United States.
Furthermore, there is a Modern Art movement called Primitivism where Europeans appropriated/plundered African and Islamic art because they thought it was “exotic.” Their interpretation that art created by anyone outside of Europe was “primitive,” and this is absolutely reductive and disrespectful. Unfortunately, I have been to a few too many art museums in this current century that have an African gallery where everything is jumbled together without respect to the complex and diverse cultures from Africa. I truly wish I could reference specific artwork that Matisse and the other Fauves viewed, but I can’t find a clear record. After a fair amount of digging, I found a photograph of one sculpture owned by Henri Matisse. The caption stated that it was created by the Vili people from the Congo in the late 19th century. The sculpture itself depicts a person sitting on a stool with their feet flat on the plinth the entire statue is resting upon. The sculpture is symmetrical and the unknown artist exaggerated the anatomy. The figure’s head is about as large as the torso, the arms are longer than the legs, and the legs are only about as long as the upper body. The subject is tipping their head up slightly, and both of their hands are on the chin. The elbows are pointed down and touch the sides of the body. The eyes are large and are an off-white color, but the rest of the sculpture appears to be a dark brown. I can’t tell if the eyes were originally intended to be blank or if the original sculpted eyes were removed. The artist who made this sculpture was a contemporary of Matisse, but the colonizers who took this sculpture did not bother to record the artist’s name or the original intent.
What the French artists observed about African art was all mushed together, and the art itself was acquired under suspicious circumstances. Matisse did have a collection of African artifacts and objects, but he purchased most of the items in France. The artist used these objects as set dressing for his many, many paintings of nude women. Depicting the human form was what interested him the most. He certainly was a fan of the way the Orientalist painters depicted odalisques, and he exalted the tradition of painting nude white women for the male gaze. There’s a long history of heteronormative men artists painting nude women for their enjoyment, and they could get by with it as long as they named the women Venus. The Orientalists got a free pass to depict nude women as long as they called them odalisques. Matisse painted scores of nude fantasy women as though they were in harems in the in the Middle and Near East. Matisse even traveled to Morocco and claimed he went into a harem, but it seems very unlikely that he was permitted in the private part of the home that was off limits to strangers, especially men. It’s more likely that he visited a brothel and claimed it was a harem. Many Orientalists had fantasy interpretations of what they thought harems were like since they weren’t permitted to enter.
Blue Nude: Memory of Biskra was painted by Henri Matisse in 1907. It’s about 3 feet tall and less than 5 feet wide. The canvas is engulfed by a heavily outlined nude woman with pink and blue skin. She is in an environment with a few pink and orange fern-like plants in the background, and there are green and blue patches of scratchy color surrounding her body. The left edge of the canvas has some green leaves and red blotches that represent plants. The nude figure fills up most of the canvas, and it would be easy for one to imagine her exclaiming, “Paint me like one of your French girls.” The figure is propped up on her right elbow, and her left hand is on her head. Her left elbow is bent and extends beyond the top of the canvas. Her left hip is poised way up to make her hips appear twice as large as her waist. Her left knee touches the ground, concealing her right hip and thigh. Her feet are in the bottom right corner of the picture plane, and it appears that the foot that is farther away from the viewer is larger. This painting is currently at the Baltimore Museum of Art.
Now, I don’t mean to insult Matisse or those who adore this painting, but when I showed a photo of Blue Nude: Memory of Biskra to my intelligent and compassionate college students, many of them burst out laughing and even more rolled their eyes. I think they had their fill of strange depictions of passive nude women in odd poses that are supposed to be appealing. They are not the right audience for this work: they aren’t rich, white, heteronormative men from early 20th century France. In “Notes of a Painter,” Matisse wrote, “What interests me most is neither still life nor landscape, but the human figure.” After reading this quote, one of my students asked, “If he liked painting the human figure so much, why was he so bad at it?”
Several of my students were specifically baffled by Matisse’s incomprehensible depiction of gravity-defying breasts. One person compared the anatomy to Michelangelo Buonarroti’s sculpture Night, which he carved during the Renaissance. This marble statue basically looks like a muscular dude took a Nerf ball, sliced it in half, and then glued the pieces to his chest right before swooning. Another student noted that Blue Nude looked as though the model had butt implants done by a plastic surgeon who didn’t have a medical license. I will note that the anatomy is “interesting,” and I use this term purposefully. Furthermore, I want to divulge that my students aren’t the only ones who did not appreciate this painting upon first sight. Blue Nude was in the 1913 Armory Show, which travelled to Chicago. There were many students from the Art Institute who despised this painting so much they held a mock trial and burned an effigy of it. A student stood in for Matisse under the name “Henry Harry Mattress” during the trial. While a contemporary audience may think this protest was a little extreme, I wonder how much activities like one this sparked happenings and performance art later in the century.
Matisse painted many passive, languid, nude women with creative anatomy throughout his career. He continued to create many of these paintings after Fauvism ended. Fauvism was a brief moment in art history because for something to be avant-garde, it can’t last long. Blue Nude led him to paint many other nude women, both blue and other colors, and he especially enjoyed painting odalisques. I have actually parodied a few of his poses in my own paintings. I am working on a series I call Brodalisques, where I address and challenge how Western artists objectified women in the 19th and 20th centuries. If you go to my website, klairelockheart.com and visit the “Artwork” section, I bet you could easily see how my paintings react to Matisse and the Orientalists.
[Music]
Did Matisse only paint nude women in bright, vivid, and unnatural colors? No! He sometimes painted his fully clothed wife, Amélie. (Well, he painted her before she left him because she suspected he was having an affair with a model who was 41 years younger than him.) Anyway, in 1905, Matisse created Woman with a Hat, which is a vertical portrait of his wife. She is depicted from the waist up, and she is in 3/4 profile. She is wearing a giant hat that consumes the top third of the canvas. The brim of the hat is composed of cool colors, and the top is decorated with various indecipherable shapes in greens, oranges, and violets. Amélie’s face is in the center of the canvas. Her hair is red, her ear is a light orange, but her face is mostly shades and tints of green. The tip of her nose is yellow. Her upper lip is red, but her bottom lip is pink. Matisse painted her neck orange and yellow. Her body is made out of scratches and blobs that give the indication that she is leaning over the back of a chair, but her right hand could possibly be in a glove, an oven mitt, or a giant green lobster claw. The background is various splashes of green, yellow, light violet, and orange.
Woman with a Hat was first displayed at the 1905 Autumn Salon, and it caused an uproar. The artist received a fair amount of criticism for this painting, but he didn’t have time to wallow in self-pity for too long because he sold the artwork to Leo and Gertrude Stein, a pair of sibling art collectors. They paid about $100 for the oil painting, which is equivalent to just under $3,000 today. If you balked at the price, permit me to share that the most expensive painting created by Matisse sold for $80.8 million in 2018. This was a painting called Odalisque couchée aux magnolias. I have no idea how much Woman with a Hat would be worth if the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art ever deaccessioned it, but I’m sure it would be phenomenally more than what the Steins paid for it. My advice to you is that if you like art, you should buy artwork from living artists before they get too famous. Go to student shows, visit your local galleries, or seek out artists in your area on social media. I actually made an oil painting called Brodalisque Couchée en Westfalia, which references Odalisque couchée aux magnolias, but now that I think about it, I don’t think I priced it high enough. Seriously, go buy art from living artists; we have a terrible habit of undervaluing our own work.
Stay tuned after the break to learn more about Fauvism.
[Break]
Matisse wasn’t the only wild beast at the 1905 Autumn Salon. He was joined by André Derain, Maurice de Vlaminck, and Georges Braque amongst others. André Derain spent the summer of 1905 with Matisse, and the two of them made paintings for the Autumn Salon exhibition. Even though Fauvism was centered in Paris, Derain made many paintings in London. Claude Monet’s Impressionist paintings of London were a recent hit in Paris, and so Derain’s art dealer sent him to London to make new paintings in the Fauvist style in 1906.
His London Bridge composition is 26x39 inches, and it is at the MoMA in New York. The bridge cuts across the canvas at a diagonal from the top left to the bottom right. The artist created the bridge with bright yellow, green, and orange brushstrokes. The shadows under the arches are blue. There is a boat under the largest arch moving at a perpendicular angle. The inside of the boat is constructed of warm colors, and the exterior is blue. The water is green and yellow with bits of blue. Derain created the water with choppy rectangles of color, and the water curves around the bridge in an arc of big dashes. The horizon fills the top quarter of the canvas, and the blue and light green buildings blur into each other. The sliver of visible sky is composed of patches of orange paint.
André Derain’s vivid London pictures still impact painters today. Every time I go to a craft fair or touristy art gallery, there always seems to be an offering of local landmarks depicted in bright rainbow colors. I’m not sure if the contemporary creators of those images are aware they have a lineage that goes back to the Fauves, or if they just saw nifty photos on the internet and wanted to emulate that style because they thought they’d be marketable. I live in an area where art education at the K-12 level is not prioritized, and there are many artists who unfortunately lack even the most rudimentary grasp of art history because they attended schools that didn’t have an art program. It’s heartbreaking. For example, I recently saw an exhibition catalogue that included a painting of a slightly abstracted woman in a hat that clearly looked like a combination of Woman with a Hat and The Green Line by Matisse. The composition and vivid colors were remarkably similar, and the artist even matched the shade of green for the shadows. In their artist statement, they revealed that they were inspired by “A painting of a woman in a hat by an obscure European artist.” It was shocking to me that a person who is clearly emulating Fauvist portraits couldn’t name their inspiration. It was even more surprising that they thought Matisse was obscure! Now, I don’t expect everyone to know everything about the history of art, but I do wish I lived in an area that respected art education enough to make sure that it was included in the curriculum. Art is a vital part of our culture and history, and I can only imagine how much stronger the artwork would be in my area if everyone had access to decent art teachers when they were children.
Anyway, allow me to introduce you to one more Fauvist just in case you want to make an unnaturally colorful painting and you want to properly credit your inspiration. Maurice de Vlaminck, who was not afraid to credit Vincent van Gogh as an inspiration, was another influential Fauvist. He was one of the few Modernists who didn’t come from a rich family, but like many of his peers he was a womanizer. Regardless, de Vlaminck created choppy paintings with unnatural colors and once said, “What I could have done in real life only by throwing a bomb… I tried to achieve in painting.” He worked closely with André Derain and exhibited his art in the 1905 Autumn Salon. The Minneapolis Institute of Art, the Joslyn Art Museum in Omaha, and the National Gallery of Art have paintings by de Vlaminck on display.
Overall, Fauvism was one of many influential Modern Art movements. It only lasted a few years, but their bright and unnatural colors still impact Western artists today. These Parisian painters were rebelling against the established institutions of art. They continued to try new techniques as the Impressionists and Postimpressionists before them. Henri Matisse was the most famous Fauvist, but André Derain, Maurice de Vlaminck, and other artists contributed to this movement. The Fauves were known for their vivid paintings, which is why they were called the “Wild Beasts.” Fauvists embraced this title, and they left their mark on art history.
[Music]
I’m so happy that you took the time to listen to me talk about Fauvism. Thank you! Please join me next time to learn about Cubism. If you go to my website you can find episode transcripts and see my resources. Just go to klairelockheart.com and then go to the “Media” tab. That’s K-L-A-I-R-E-L-O-C-K-H-E-A-R-T dot com. Find me on Instagram @klairelockheart to see my artwork and adventures, or you can join me on Facebook by searching for Klaire A. Lockheart.
The History of Modern Art with Klaire was created by me, Klaire Lockheart. This podcast was recorded with equipment provided by the amazing Aaron C. Packard of Aaron C. Packard Productions. Check out his artwork at aaronpackard.com, that’s A-A-R-O-N-P-A-C-K-A-R-D dot com. Once again, I immensely appreciate your support and positive feedback. Please remember to subscribe if you enjoyed this podcast. Thank you!
[Music]
Fauvism was an avant-garde Modern Art movement that lasted from about 1905-1908 in Paris, France. Avant-garde means when something is brand new, radical, and has never previously been done, and there was a fast succession of Modernist movements because each new wave of artists attempted to outdo their predecessors. The Impressionists set off a chain reaction in the 19th century. They did their best to prove they were better than the establishment of the Salon exhibitions and promoted their work as new and rebellious. The Orientalists tried to claim they were better than the Impressionists by incorporating sharp, tiny details in their paintings. Postimpressionism made its debut at the last Impressionist exhibition in 1886 in Paris. Of course the artists in Paris didn’t think art was done evolving, and the next Modern Art movement was born in the early 20th century.
Before I get to Fauvism, let me set the stage. In Paris, the Salon was the most important art exhibition. However, thousands of artists were rejected from the show, and so the Salon des Refusés was established in 1863. This was where the artists who were rejected from the official Salon were able to display their work. This exhibition inspired the Impressionists to start hosting their their own exhibitions separate from the Salon. This is a tradition that still happens to this day. For example, I’ve organized my own group art shows after I grew dissatisfied by the lack of exhibition opportunities available in my region. One of the first group exhibitions I conceived of and organized was Subversive Celebration, which was an international mail-in art show that was displayed at the University of South Dakota. The next group show I organized and curated was the Packard Group National Exhibition in 2020 and again in 2021. I suppose if I keep curating the Packard Group exhibition annually it won’t be new and edgy anymore, but I’m not trying to show up an old art establishment that’s hundreds of years old. I truly am dissatisfied with the lack of exhibition opportunities for artists in South Dakota, and I want to help contemporary artists show their artwork in my community. I am always impressed with the artists I include in my exhibitions, and you can see their work featured on my website klairelockheart.com.
Anyway, the independent art shows in Paris inspired other artists to created their own exhibitions, and they were even able to charge admission. The Salon d’Automne, or “Autumn Salon” in English, was established in 1903, but the important exhibition I want you to remember occurred in 1905. Since I am sharing a lot of French names and terms, I would quickly like to ask for forgiveness when I inadvertently mispronounce something. The 1905 Autumn Salon was the debut of Fauvism! This exhibition featured new work from artists who pushed the limits of what color could do in the Western art world. The artists at this exhibition were positively impacted by the Impressionists and Postimpressionists, and they created compositions that had wild, unnatural colors. They used bold, obvious brushstrokes. When art critic Louis Vauxcelles saw the display, he noticed one realistic looking bust that reminded him of Renaissance sculptures. He declared that sculpture was “Donatello among the fauves.” “Fauve” means “wild beast,” and the name stuck. These Parisian artists who painted with loose, thick, quick brushstrokes of unnatural color became the Fauvists.
The one representational sculpture that reminded the art critic of Renaissance artist Donatello, was created by Albert Marque. The rest of the work was vivid, and even though Louis Vauxcelles said it was wild, he was actually supportive of the movement overall. The unnatural color was shocking to the critic and the audiences who saw it for the first time. The room where this radical, colorful artwork was housed was referred to as the “cage of the wild beasts.”
This artwork was bold, bright, and the artists used unnatural colors. Instead of representing the world around them, the Fauves selected colors to express their feelings. One of the leaders of this movement, Henri Matisse, stated, “My choice of colors does not rest on any scientific theory; it is based on observation, on feeling, on the very nature of each experience.” While the Fauvists were inspired by the Impressionists and the Postimpressionists, they said they rejected color theory in favor of expression. While they proclaimed they didn’t employ color theory, I would argue that they did, but just in a different way than the Postimpressionists. Paul Signac and George Seurat painstakingly painted tiny dots and dashes and relied upon optical mixing to make their paintings. For example, they would use a combination of unblended yellow and red dots to create an orange object. The Fauves didn’t invoke this methodical approach to color theory, but I will assert that they did take advantage of their knowledge of complementary colors to make their hues appear more vivid. Complementary colors are opposites on the color wheel, and when they are placed next to each other, they can make the other seem more vibrant. For instance, this is why orange stands out when it is next to blue.
Artists in early 20th century France thought they were innovative when they used color in a way that didn’t represent the natural world, but I do want to take a moment to point out that the Fauves weren’t the first artists on the planet to apply color this way. Part of the myth of the “genius” of the Modernists is that they were the first to do something. They were trailblazers, and everyone else who adopted their methods were considered derivative. Being labeled as “derivative” in the art world is an insult, and it implies a lack of creativity. However, the Fauves weren’t the first to use unnatural color to depict people or scenes. An example that comes to my mind includes artwork from ancient Egypt. Thousands of years ago, artists from pharaonic times would would make paintings and sculptures of people with unnatural colors. They didn’t always represent what they observed in the world around them. Wesir, whose name is Osiris in Greek, was often depicted with green skin. He was the God of the afterlife and a fertility Deity, and green represented growth and rebirth. I have also seen artwork from India that depicts Shiva and Vishnu with blue skin. While the Fauves may have been convinced that they were the first artists ever to make paintings with unnatural colors, they weren’t. Part of their narrow worldview resulted from the colonialist viewpoints they embraced. They were aware that there was life outside of Paris, but they thought they were the pinnacle of civilization.
Join me after the break to learn more about Henri Matisse, one of the most famous Fauvists.
[Break]
Henri Matisse was one of the many French artists who was born into a wealthy family. Most popular Modernists were cis-het white men, who lived in Paris, who were rich, and had connections. I don’t want to discredit the art they created or downplay the impact these famous artists had, but it is a lot easier to create new and innovative artwork with family and financial support than it is to struggle alone with financial instability. Artists are certainly able to have a greater creative output when they don’t have to spend the bulk of their time working at a separate job to pay the bills and purchase supplies. This was also an era before the age of crippling student debt! If you are a student trying to make ends meet or you’re a person who gets frustrated because you don’t have enough time to devote to your creative outlets, your exasperation is valid. Anyway, Matisse began training as an artist in a traditional way, but after he was introduced to Impressionism and Postimpressionism, it influenced him greatly. Matisse was inspired by Vincent van Gogh and Paul Signac. He bought artwork from artists he admired. Matisse was also influenced by Paul Gaugin, but I want to spend as little time as possible talking about that child molester. Let’s just say that Matisse was influenced by many Postimpressionists.
Matisse read “Eugène Delacroix to Neo-Impressionism” by Paul Signac, who developed and advocated for Pointillism, which is a specific type of Postimpressionism. Color was important to Signac, and Matisse was excited by it. In “Notes of a Painter” Matisse declared, “The chief function of colour should be to serve expression as well as possible.” His paintings included vibrant, vivid, and bright colors. In 1904, Matisse painted Luxury, Calm and Pleasure. This painting is a little over 3 feet tall, it is made out of blobs and dashes of vivid hues, and it is currently at the Musée d’Orsay in Paris. This composition is reminiscent of a mosaic, but instead of tiles the artist used paint. Matisse’s brushstrokes aren’t as meticulous as the those of the Pointillists, but this painting was clearly influenced by the paintings created by Paul Signac and Georges Seurat.
Matisse made many colorful paintings that make it look like he had a lot of fun on vacation. He wrote, “What I dream of is an art of balance, of purity and serenity, devoid of troubling or depressing subject-matter.” Luxury, Calm and Pleasure is divided in half horizontally, and the top portion is the sky, composed of red, pink, green, yellow, and violet plops of unblended paint. The earth is split in half with a diagonal shoreline that goes from the left horizon to the bottom right corner. The water reflects the vivid sky with horizontal brushstrokes of color. The sand on the beach is made of warm colors: red, orange, yellow, and pink. There is a skinny tree near the right of the canvas, and the blue and multi-colored trunk stretches off the picture plane. Matisse included several lounging and languid nude women, which is a reoccurring theme for the artist. The woman standing closest to the tree appears to be pulling her long hair into a high ponytail above her head. Her body is highlighted with yellow paint, but her skin is composed of all the colors of the rainbow applied in blobs. The other women are on the red-ish ground, and they are hopefully sitting on green mats. Either that, or their shadows are green and they will all have a miserable time trying to remove sand from some very delicate crevices. There is also a picnic blanket in the lower left corner with some dishes on it.
In addition to being influenced by the Postimpressionists, the Fauves were influenced by “African art,” and I hope my sarcastic quotation marks were noticeable. While the beneficiaries of French imperialism may have thought they were being worldly and inclusive by acknowledging that they looked at art created by people outside of Europe, it’s hard not to cringe when looking back through a 21st century lens. Africa is a vast continent with thousands of years of history and culture, but these 19th century avant-garde Parisian artists lumped everything together. In her book Potential History: Unlearning Imperialism, Ariella Aïsha Azulay wrote,“The looting of art from Congo, I’ll argue, is not only a significant event in the history of Congo, but also a constitutive moment in the institutionalization of modern art.” I should also mention that during the late 19th century, Leopold II of Belgium was responsible for the deaths of about 10 million Congolese people, and he gave away looted objects to museums, including museums in the United States.
Furthermore, there is a Modern Art movement called Primitivism where Europeans appropriated/plundered African and Islamic art because they thought it was “exotic.” Their interpretation that art created by anyone outside of Europe was “primitive,” and this is absolutely reductive and disrespectful. Unfortunately, I have been to a few too many art museums in this current century that have an African gallery where everything is jumbled together without respect to the complex and diverse cultures from Africa. I truly wish I could reference specific artwork that Matisse and the other Fauves viewed, but I can’t find a clear record. After a fair amount of digging, I found a photograph of one sculpture owned by Henri Matisse. The caption stated that it was created by the Vili people from the Congo in the late 19th century. The sculpture itself depicts a person sitting on a stool with their feet flat on the plinth the entire statue is resting upon. The sculpture is symmetrical and the unknown artist exaggerated the anatomy. The figure’s head is about as large as the torso, the arms are longer than the legs, and the legs are only about as long as the upper body. The subject is tipping their head up slightly, and both of their hands are on the chin. The elbows are pointed down and touch the sides of the body. The eyes are large and are an off-white color, but the rest of the sculpture appears to be a dark brown. I can’t tell if the eyes were originally intended to be blank or if the original sculpted eyes were removed. The artist who made this sculpture was a contemporary of Matisse, but the colonizers who took this sculpture did not bother to record the artist’s name or the original intent.
What the French artists observed about African art was all mushed together, and the art itself was acquired under suspicious circumstances. Matisse did have a collection of African artifacts and objects, but he purchased most of the items in France. The artist used these objects as set dressing for his many, many paintings of nude women. Depicting the human form was what interested him the most. He certainly was a fan of the way the Orientalist painters depicted odalisques, and he exalted the tradition of painting nude white women for the male gaze. There’s a long history of heteronormative men artists painting nude women for their enjoyment, and they could get by with it as long as they named the women Venus. The Orientalists got a free pass to depict nude women as long as they called them odalisques. Matisse painted scores of nude fantasy women as though they were in harems in the in the Middle and Near East. Matisse even traveled to Morocco and claimed he went into a harem, but it seems very unlikely that he was permitted in the private part of the home that was off limits to strangers, especially men. It’s more likely that he visited a brothel and claimed it was a harem. Many Orientalists had fantasy interpretations of what they thought harems were like since they weren’t permitted to enter.
Blue Nude: Memory of Biskra was painted by Henri Matisse in 1907. It’s about 3 feet tall and less than 5 feet wide. The canvas is engulfed by a heavily outlined nude woman with pink and blue skin. She is in an environment with a few pink and orange fern-like plants in the background, and there are green and blue patches of scratchy color surrounding her body. The left edge of the canvas has some green leaves and red blotches that represent plants. The nude figure fills up most of the canvas, and it would be easy for one to imagine her exclaiming, “Paint me like one of your French girls.” The figure is propped up on her right elbow, and her left hand is on her head. Her left elbow is bent and extends beyond the top of the canvas. Her left hip is poised way up to make her hips appear twice as large as her waist. Her left knee touches the ground, concealing her right hip and thigh. Her feet are in the bottom right corner of the picture plane, and it appears that the foot that is farther away from the viewer is larger. This painting is currently at the Baltimore Museum of Art.
Now, I don’t mean to insult Matisse or those who adore this painting, but when I showed a photo of Blue Nude: Memory of Biskra to my intelligent and compassionate college students, many of them burst out laughing and even more rolled their eyes. I think they had their fill of strange depictions of passive nude women in odd poses that are supposed to be appealing. They are not the right audience for this work: they aren’t rich, white, heteronormative men from early 20th century France. In “Notes of a Painter,” Matisse wrote, “What interests me most is neither still life nor landscape, but the human figure.” After reading this quote, one of my students asked, “If he liked painting the human figure so much, why was he so bad at it?”
Several of my students were specifically baffled by Matisse’s incomprehensible depiction of gravity-defying breasts. One person compared the anatomy to Michelangelo Buonarroti’s sculpture Night, which he carved during the Renaissance. This marble statue basically looks like a muscular dude took a Nerf ball, sliced it in half, and then glued the pieces to his chest right before swooning. Another student noted that Blue Nude looked as though the model had butt implants done by a plastic surgeon who didn’t have a medical license. I will note that the anatomy is “interesting,” and I use this term purposefully. Furthermore, I want to divulge that my students aren’t the only ones who did not appreciate this painting upon first sight. Blue Nude was in the 1913 Armory Show, which travelled to Chicago. There were many students from the Art Institute who despised this painting so much they held a mock trial and burned an effigy of it. A student stood in for Matisse under the name “Henry Harry Mattress” during the trial. While a contemporary audience may think this protest was a little extreme, I wonder how much activities like one this sparked happenings and performance art later in the century.
Matisse painted many passive, languid, nude women with creative anatomy throughout his career. He continued to create many of these paintings after Fauvism ended. Fauvism was a brief moment in art history because for something to be avant-garde, it can’t last long. Blue Nude led him to paint many other nude women, both blue and other colors, and he especially enjoyed painting odalisques. I have actually parodied a few of his poses in my own paintings. I am working on a series I call Brodalisques, where I address and challenge how Western artists objectified women in the 19th and 20th centuries. If you go to my website, klairelockheart.com and visit the “Artwork” section, I bet you could easily see how my paintings react to Matisse and the Orientalists.
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Did Matisse only paint nude women in bright, vivid, and unnatural colors? No! He sometimes painted his fully clothed wife, Amélie. (Well, he painted her before she left him because she suspected he was having an affair with a model who was 41 years younger than him.) Anyway, in 1905, Matisse created Woman with a Hat, which is a vertical portrait of his wife. She is depicted from the waist up, and she is in 3/4 profile. She is wearing a giant hat that consumes the top third of the canvas. The brim of the hat is composed of cool colors, and the top is decorated with various indecipherable shapes in greens, oranges, and violets. Amélie’s face is in the center of the canvas. Her hair is red, her ear is a light orange, but her face is mostly shades and tints of green. The tip of her nose is yellow. Her upper lip is red, but her bottom lip is pink. Matisse painted her neck orange and yellow. Her body is made out of scratches and blobs that give the indication that she is leaning over the back of a chair, but her right hand could possibly be in a glove, an oven mitt, or a giant green lobster claw. The background is various splashes of green, yellow, light violet, and orange.
Woman with a Hat was first displayed at the 1905 Autumn Salon, and it caused an uproar. The artist received a fair amount of criticism for this painting, but he didn’t have time to wallow in self-pity for too long because he sold the artwork to Leo and Gertrude Stein, a pair of sibling art collectors. They paid about $100 for the oil painting, which is equivalent to just under $3,000 today. If you balked at the price, permit me to share that the most expensive painting created by Matisse sold for $80.8 million in 2018. This was a painting called Odalisque couchée aux magnolias. I have no idea how much Woman with a Hat would be worth if the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art ever deaccessioned it, but I’m sure it would be phenomenally more than what the Steins paid for it. My advice to you is that if you like art, you should buy artwork from living artists before they get too famous. Go to student shows, visit your local galleries, or seek out artists in your area on social media. I actually made an oil painting called Brodalisque Couchée en Westfalia, which references Odalisque couchée aux magnolias, but now that I think about it, I don’t think I priced it high enough. Seriously, go buy art from living artists; we have a terrible habit of undervaluing our own work.
Stay tuned after the break to learn more about Fauvism.
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Matisse wasn’t the only wild beast at the 1905 Autumn Salon. He was joined by André Derain, Maurice de Vlaminck, and Georges Braque amongst others. André Derain spent the summer of 1905 with Matisse, and the two of them made paintings for the Autumn Salon exhibition. Even though Fauvism was centered in Paris, Derain made many paintings in London. Claude Monet’s Impressionist paintings of London were a recent hit in Paris, and so Derain’s art dealer sent him to London to make new paintings in the Fauvist style in 1906.
His London Bridge composition is 26x39 inches, and it is at the MoMA in New York. The bridge cuts across the canvas at a diagonal from the top left to the bottom right. The artist created the bridge with bright yellow, green, and orange brushstrokes. The shadows under the arches are blue. There is a boat under the largest arch moving at a perpendicular angle. The inside of the boat is constructed of warm colors, and the exterior is blue. The water is green and yellow with bits of blue. Derain created the water with choppy rectangles of color, and the water curves around the bridge in an arc of big dashes. The horizon fills the top quarter of the canvas, and the blue and light green buildings blur into each other. The sliver of visible sky is composed of patches of orange paint.
André Derain’s vivid London pictures still impact painters today. Every time I go to a craft fair or touristy art gallery, there always seems to be an offering of local landmarks depicted in bright rainbow colors. I’m not sure if the contemporary creators of those images are aware they have a lineage that goes back to the Fauves, or if they just saw nifty photos on the internet and wanted to emulate that style because they thought they’d be marketable. I live in an area where art education at the K-12 level is not prioritized, and there are many artists who unfortunately lack even the most rudimentary grasp of art history because they attended schools that didn’t have an art program. It’s heartbreaking. For example, I recently saw an exhibition catalogue that included a painting of a slightly abstracted woman in a hat that clearly looked like a combination of Woman with a Hat and The Green Line by Matisse. The composition and vivid colors were remarkably similar, and the artist even matched the shade of green for the shadows. In their artist statement, they revealed that they were inspired by “A painting of a woman in a hat by an obscure European artist.” It was shocking to me that a person who is clearly emulating Fauvist portraits couldn’t name their inspiration. It was even more surprising that they thought Matisse was obscure! Now, I don’t expect everyone to know everything about the history of art, but I do wish I lived in an area that respected art education enough to make sure that it was included in the curriculum. Art is a vital part of our culture and history, and I can only imagine how much stronger the artwork would be in my area if everyone had access to decent art teachers when they were children.
Anyway, allow me to introduce you to one more Fauvist just in case you want to make an unnaturally colorful painting and you want to properly credit your inspiration. Maurice de Vlaminck, who was not afraid to credit Vincent van Gogh as an inspiration, was another influential Fauvist. He was one of the few Modernists who didn’t come from a rich family, but like many of his peers he was a womanizer. Regardless, de Vlaminck created choppy paintings with unnatural colors and once said, “What I could have done in real life only by throwing a bomb… I tried to achieve in painting.” He worked closely with André Derain and exhibited his art in the 1905 Autumn Salon. The Minneapolis Institute of Art, the Joslyn Art Museum in Omaha, and the National Gallery of Art have paintings by de Vlaminck on display.
Overall, Fauvism was one of many influential Modern Art movements. It only lasted a few years, but their bright and unnatural colors still impact Western artists today. These Parisian painters were rebelling against the established institutions of art. They continued to try new techniques as the Impressionists and Postimpressionists before them. Henri Matisse was the most famous Fauvist, but André Derain, Maurice de Vlaminck, and other artists contributed to this movement. The Fauves were known for their vivid paintings, which is why they were called the “Wild Beasts.” Fauvists embraced this title, and they left their mark on art history.
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I’m so happy that you took the time to listen to me talk about Fauvism. Thank you! Please join me next time to learn about Cubism. If you go to my website you can find episode transcripts and see my resources. Just go to klairelockheart.com and then go to the “Media” tab. That’s K-L-A-I-R-E-L-O-C-K-H-E-A-R-T dot com. Find me on Instagram @klairelockheart to see my artwork and adventures, or you can join me on Facebook by searching for Klaire A. Lockheart.
The History of Modern Art with Klaire was created by me, Klaire Lockheart. This podcast was recorded with equipment provided by the amazing Aaron C. Packard of Aaron C. Packard Productions. Check out his artwork at aaronpackard.com, that’s A-A-R-O-N-P-A-C-K-A-R-D dot com. Once again, I immensely appreciate your support and positive feedback. Please remember to subscribe if you enjoyed this podcast. Thank you!
Resources
Ariella Aïsha Azulay, Potential History: Unlearning Imperialism. New York: Verso, 2019.
John Berger, Ways of Seeing. (London: Penguin Books, 1977).
Greg Cook, “Is It Still OK To Like Matisse’s Harem Fantasy Paintings?” WBUR, April 08, 2017, https://www.wbur.org/artery/2017/04/08/matisse-in-the-studio
John Elderfield, “The ‘wild beasts’ : Fauvism and its affinities,” 1976, Museum of Modern Art,
https://assets.moma.org/documents/moma_catalogue_2470_300298256.pdf
Fisun Güner, “How a small African figurine changed art,” BBC, August 21, 2017, https://www.bbc.com/culture/article/20170818-how-a-small-african-figurine-changed-art
Geoffrey Johnson, “Matisse Returns to the Art Institute—This Time to Cheers, Not Jeers,” Chicago Magazine, April 05, 2010, https://www.chicagomag.com/city-life/april-2010/henri-matisse-art-institute-of-chicago/
Peter Kalb, ed., H. H. Arnason History of Modern Art, 5th ed. (Upper Saddle River: Prentice Hall, Inc, 2004).
Henri Matisse, “Notes of a Painter,” in Art in Theory 1900-2000: An Anthology of Changing Ideas, ed. Charles Harrison and Paul Wood (Malden: Blackwell Publishing, 2003), 69-75.
“Matisse Portrait Goes for $80.8 M. at Christie’s Rockefeller Sale, Record for Artist at Auction,” ARTnews, May 08, 2018, https://www.artnews.com/art-news/market/matisse-goes-80-8-m-christies-rockefeller-sale-10292/
Sam Phillips, …isms: Understanding Modern Art. (New York: Universe, 2013).
Sabine Rewald, “Fauvism,” Metropolitan Museum of Art, October, 2004, https://www.metmuseum.org/toah/hd/fauv/hd_fauv.htm
Sheryl Siclari-Ostyn, “Maurice de Vlaminck Artist Overview and Analysis,” The Art Story, September 26, 2016, https://www.theartstory.org/artist/vlaminck-maurice-de/life-and-legacy/
Paul Signac, “From Eugéne Delacroix to Neo-Impressionism,” in Art in Theory 1900-2000: An Anthology of Changing Ideas, ed. Charles Harrison and Paul Wood (Malden: Blackwell Publishing, 2003), 15-18.
Jeffrey Weiss, “Henri Matisse the Fauves,” Art for the Nation, 2000, https://www.nga.gov/features/slideshows/the-fauves.html
John Berger, Ways of Seeing. (London: Penguin Books, 1977).
Greg Cook, “Is It Still OK To Like Matisse’s Harem Fantasy Paintings?” WBUR, April 08, 2017, https://www.wbur.org/artery/2017/04/08/matisse-in-the-studio
John Elderfield, “The ‘wild beasts’ : Fauvism and its affinities,” 1976, Museum of Modern Art,
https://assets.moma.org/documents/moma_catalogue_2470_300298256.pdf
Fisun Güner, “How a small African figurine changed art,” BBC, August 21, 2017, https://www.bbc.com/culture/article/20170818-how-a-small-african-figurine-changed-art
Geoffrey Johnson, “Matisse Returns to the Art Institute—This Time to Cheers, Not Jeers,” Chicago Magazine, April 05, 2010, https://www.chicagomag.com/city-life/april-2010/henri-matisse-art-institute-of-chicago/
Peter Kalb, ed., H. H. Arnason History of Modern Art, 5th ed. (Upper Saddle River: Prentice Hall, Inc, 2004).
Henri Matisse, “Notes of a Painter,” in Art in Theory 1900-2000: An Anthology of Changing Ideas, ed. Charles Harrison and Paul Wood (Malden: Blackwell Publishing, 2003), 69-75.
“Matisse Portrait Goes for $80.8 M. at Christie’s Rockefeller Sale, Record for Artist at Auction,” ARTnews, May 08, 2018, https://www.artnews.com/art-news/market/matisse-goes-80-8-m-christies-rockefeller-sale-10292/
Sam Phillips, …isms: Understanding Modern Art. (New York: Universe, 2013).
Sabine Rewald, “Fauvism,” Metropolitan Museum of Art, October, 2004, https://www.metmuseum.org/toah/hd/fauv/hd_fauv.htm
Sheryl Siclari-Ostyn, “Maurice de Vlaminck Artist Overview and Analysis,” The Art Story, September 26, 2016, https://www.theartstory.org/artist/vlaminck-maurice-de/life-and-legacy/
Paul Signac, “From Eugéne Delacroix to Neo-Impressionism,” in Art in Theory 1900-2000: An Anthology of Changing Ideas, ed. Charles Harrison and Paul Wood (Malden: Blackwell Publishing, 2003), 15-18.
Jeffrey Weiss, “Henri Matisse the Fauves,” Art for the Nation, 2000, https://www.nga.gov/features/slideshows/the-fauves.html