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Lot Essay
"Fauvism was our ordeal by fire... colours became charges of dynamite. They were expected to charge light... The great merit of this method was to free the picture from all imitative and conventional contact." - André Derain
LES FAUVES – A COLOUR REBELLION
“What I could have done in real life only by throwing a bomb which would have led to the scaffold I tried to achieve in painting by using color of maximum purity. In this way I satisfied my urge to destroy old conventions, to disobey in order to re-create a tangible, living, and liberated world.” - Maurice de Vlaminck
It was during the 1905 Salon d’Automne that the term “Fauves” was first used to describe a radical group of young artists who
turned the conventions of colour upside down. Henri Matisse and André Derain were the leaders of the movement and Louis Valtat, Maurice de Vlaminck, Henri Manguin, Albert Marquet, Raoul Dufy all contributed their own interpretations of the movement. They showed their work to an outraged public in the three Salon d’automne exhibitions that took place between 1905 and 1910 with their strong and pure colours, shaking up and challenging the art establishment.
The term Fauve, translated as “Wild beasts”, was coined by journalist Louis Vauxcelles to described the audacity and novelty of their chromatic expression. By applying large strokes of paint straight from the tube and liberating colour from reference solely to the object, the Fauves generated new level of expression, beyond the softness of palette seen in impressionism, centred instead around instinct and juxtaposition.
This section includes works by the leaders of Fauvism and those who took on these radical new ideas. All artists presented here are known to have exhibited in the historical salon d’Automne and the famous “cage aux fauves”, the Wild Beast Cage.
LES FAUVES – A COLOUR REBELLION
“What I could have done in real life only by throwing a bomb which would have led to the scaffold I tried to achieve in painting by using color of maximum purity. In this way I satisfied my urge to destroy old conventions, to disobey in order to re-create a tangible, living, and liberated world.” - Maurice de Vlaminck
It was during the 1905 Salon d’Automne that the term “Fauves” was first used to describe a radical group of young artists who
turned the conventions of colour upside down. Henri Matisse and André Derain were the leaders of the movement and Louis Valtat, Maurice de Vlaminck, Henri Manguin, Albert Marquet, Raoul Dufy all contributed their own interpretations of the movement. They showed their work to an outraged public in the three Salon d’automne exhibitions that took place between 1905 and 1910 with their strong and pure colours, shaking up and challenging the art establishment.
The term Fauve, translated as “Wild beasts”, was coined by journalist Louis Vauxcelles to described the audacity and novelty of their chromatic expression. By applying large strokes of paint straight from the tube and liberating colour from reference solely to the object, the Fauves generated new level of expression, beyond the softness of palette seen in impressionism, centred instead around instinct and juxtaposition.
This section includes works by the leaders of Fauvism and those who took on these radical new ideas. All artists presented here are known to have exhibited in the historical salon d’Automne and the famous “cage aux fauves”, the Wild Beast Cage.