The Fauves. Nathalia Brodskaya

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      They really did not have a leader, and not in the least because there was no-one among them capable of taking the lead – it simply contradicted the very essence of Fauvism. Perhaps this association of young men was the realization, albeit short-lived, of the Utopian dream of a disinterested collaboration between equals which had more than once been voiced aloud by the most direct and sincere of artists – Van Gogh, Douanier Rousseau, the Georgian naïve painter Niko Pirosmani. Each was left to his own devices, for them there could be no other program; they met any suggestion that something else existed with protest. “We had no doctrine, any of us,” Van Dongen stated. “For the Impressionists you can use the word ‘school’, because they had certain principles. We did not have any; it only seemed to us that their colours were a bit too insipid, that’s all.”[17] In denying the existence of a doctrine. Van Dongen here in fact confirmed a principle important for Fauvism. On the one hand, their painting proceeded directly from that of the Impressionists for whom they felt sincere respect. On the other hand, the Fauves occupied an anti-Impressionist position, just as they were anti-Nabis, as had already been noted by the critics at the time.

      The route from the Old Masters to Fauvism, running from the Venetians and Francisco Goya, inevitably passes through Eugène Delacroix. It was no mere chance that contemporary researchers compare Fauvism with Delacroix’s painting,[18] all the more so since the Fauves turned to him in a completely conscious manner. “Delacroix is especially worthy of our efforts and our understanding; he opened the doors of our era,” the young Derain wrote to Vlaminck.[19] Fritz Vanderpyl, a poet from Montmartre, called Fauvism “wild Impressionism.”[20] It is true the Impressionists’ revelation of the possibilities of pure colour, the unconstrained and expressive aspect of texture, were a stage which led to the emergence of the Fauves’ chromatic approach.

      Van Gogh, Gauguin, and Cézanne brought painting to a position where accumulated ideas about the possibilities of creating with paints had to be resolved in a flood of new works. And the means of the Fauves protests against being considered Impressionists, the hub in which all their charges against their predecessors were concentrated, became colour, which attained such an intensity and expressive force that all other means faded into the background alongside it. Colour became the banner of the Fauves, the symbol of the liberation of their painting from all fetters. It was a part of that very programme, the existence of which they denied.

      The Fauves’ colour carried optimism within it in contrast to that of their German Expressionist contemporaries. To them, one thing that remained unshakeable in painting was that it was born out of life and reflected life which was its true source. “The goal we set ourselves is happiness, a happiness which consequently we should create,” Derain said.[21] In order to create it, one must have a love of life itself, be endowed with that “Flemish sense of joy” which Apollinaire found in Vlaminck’s painting.[22] “I love life more than anything,” Jean Puy bashfully confessed.[23] He was boldly seconded by Van Dongen: “Oh! Life. It is perhaps even more beautiful than painting.”[24]

      It was just this irrepressible striving after joy which attracted them to the work of Auguste Renoir. It is evident that Renoir’s influence was not only on individual Fauves, but also on the movement as a whole. This fact has not been fully appreciated. Nevertheless, it was in him, not yet as distant in time as the works in museums, that they found the qualities which in their totality comprised the core of the visual expression of Fauvism: joie de vivre and the triumph of the element of colour.

      At the start of the century the Fauves were the first to proclaim preference for the intuitive course in painting; the power of the painterly element over the artistic, as one of the inseparable qualities of the freedom after which they were striving. Even the most rational of them – Matisse, who was most inclined to make experiments in painting on a par with scientific research – asserted: “It is through colour that I feel.”[25]

      Henri Matisse, Statuette and Vases on Oriental Carpet or Still Life in Red of Venice, 1908.

      Oil on canvas, 89 × 104 cm.

      Pushkin State Museum of Fine Arts, Moscow.

      Henri Matisse, Spanish Still Life, c. 1910–1911.

      Oil on canvas, 89.5 × 116.3 cm.

      State Hermitage Museum, Saint Petersburg.

      Henri Matisse, Still Life with ‘The Dance’, 1909.

      Oil on canvas, 89.5 × 117.5 cm.

      State Hermitage Museum, Saint Petersburg.

      Despite its many-layered complexity, Fauvism had an entirely definite orientation. Cubism, which appeared alongside after an interval of two years, not only overshadowed Fauvism, but also placed both phenomena in a definite position in the general historical succession. Cubism appeared as a variety of Classicism, superseding the Romanticism of the Fauves. Both these currents continued to flow in parallel, gathering strength in turns, overtaking one another, changing in form but retaining their essence. Not one of the Fauves called himself a Romantic. Nevertheless, the paintings produced by the majority of them make it possible to relate their work to the Romantic tendency, to the line of Delacroix, whom they all valued highly, in contrast to the Cubists, who preferred Jean Auguste Dominique Ingres. As regards the terminology being a hangover from the nineteenth century: for the Fauves the concept of “Classicism” had not lost the meaning which it had for the Romantics of the previous age. “I wanted to bring about a revolution in morals, in contemporary life, to show nature at liberty, to free it from the ancient theories of Classicism whose authority I hated as much as that of a general or a colonel,” Vlaminck said.[26] And while in the nineteenth century literature and music formed a single powerful Romantic union, in the new upsurge of Romanticism at the beginning of the twentieth century, it was painting which dominated.

      No small part of the significance of Fauvism lies in the fact that, created by young artists at the turn of the century, it became, in turn, a medium that nourished and educated them. Fauvism signified a path of natural development without any kind of force or compulsion. It taught the ability to listen to oneself, to take a pride in what was one’s own, the individual, and to hold firmly to it. Leaving aside the eloquent examples of Matisse and Van Dongen, we must pay tribute to the courage of Dufy, Marquet, Puy, Manguin or Chabaud – their work became the embodiment of precisely that which Vlaminck said in verse: “The nightingale doesn’t sing into the phonograph.”СКАЧАТЬ