Fauvism

Fauvism was an early 20th century art movement pioneered by Henri Matisse and André Derain. The Fauves (“wild beasts”) were a group of French artists who favored expressive and vivid use of color over Impressionism’s naturalism. Fauve art liberated color from its representational function, using it purely for emotive power.
Matisse’s seminal painting Bonheur de Vivre (1905) showed the shockingly arbitrary use of color that defined Fauvism. Fauve paintings featured simplified drawings with bright, unnaturalistic color. Subjects disappeared under thick brushstrokes of red, yellow and blue meant to convey light, warmth and harmony.
The Fauves shared Impressionism’s spirit of openness to modern life. But they aimed to capture sensory and emotive experiences through color over visual perfection. Paintings had a spontaneous and joyful quality reflecting new artistic freedoms of the era.
The Fauves met with harsh criticism for their radical style. The movement lasted only a few years but altered Modern art’s trajectory. Fauvism shaped Expressionism and subsequent explorations of color’s emotive and symbolic power. Its liberating spirit lived on in modern art’s turn toward subjectivity, visual daring and prioritizing feeling over strict appearances.
At its heights, Fauvism captured the vigor, optimism and pursuit of pleasure that shaped Parisian life early the 20th century. Through shockingly vivid colors and gestural brushwork, Matisse and Derain conveyed a lust for experience that made visible the zeitgeist of an era poised between old and new. The Fauves demonstrated how profoundly art’s expressive capacities could be expanded if color were freed from the bounds of strict naturalism to become a vehicle for experiencing the essence of life itself.