Fauvism

Fauvism was the first avant-garde movement of twentieth century France, breaking with Impressionist and academic traditions of representing color as it naturally appears. Centered on Henri Matisse and Andre Derain, who worked side by side in Collioure in the summer of 1905, the Fauves applied vivid, often unmixed color in bold, expressive strokes, using color itself, not tone or line, as the primary vehicle of emotional and formal expression. When their canvases appeared at the 1905 Salon d'Automne in Paris, the critic Louis Vauxcelles derided them as fauves, or wild beasts, a label the group embraced as its name. Though short-lived as a coherent group, Fauvism was pivotal in moving European painting toward abstraction and directly influenced the German Expressionists and, through Derain's and Matisse's later work, subsequent modernist developments.