The Fauves 9781783103720, 1783103728, 9781780428062

Table of contents :
Content: A HISTORY OF FAUVISM
HENRI MATISSE
MAURICE DE VLAMINCK
ANDRÉ DERAIN
ALBERT MARQUET
RAOUL DUFY
OTHON FRIESZ
HENRI MANGUIN
KEES VAN DONGEN
GEORGES ROUAULT
JEAN PUY
LOUIS VALTAT
HENRI LE FAUCONNIER
RENÉ SEYSSAUD
AUGUSTE CHABAUD 1882-1955
NOTES
INDEX.

Citation preview

Nathalia Brodskaïa

The Fauves

Author: Nathalia Brodskaïa

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© Confidential Concepts, worldwide, USA © Parkstone Press International, New York, USA © Auguste Chabaud, Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York / ADAGP, Paris © Othon Friesz, Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York / ADAGP, Paris © Henri Manguin, Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York / ADAGP, Paris © André Derain, Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York / ADAGP, Paris © Louis Valtat, Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York / ADAGP, Paris © Georges Rouault, Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York / ADAGP, Paris © Kees van Dongen, Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York / ADAGP, Paris © Albert Marquet, Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York / ADAGP, Paris © Maurice de Vlaminck, Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York / ADAGP, Paris © Raoul Dufy, Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York / ADAGP, Paris © Jean Puy, Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York / ADAGP, Paris © René Seyssaud, Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York / ADAGP, Paris © Succession H. Matisse, Paris / Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York © Henri Le Fauconnier, all rights reserved

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or adapted without the permission of the copyright holder, throughout the world. Unless otherwise specified, copyright on the works reproduced lies with the respective photographers, artists, heirs or estates. Despite intensive research, it has not always been possible to establish copyright ownership. Where this is the case, we would appreciate notification. eISBN: 978-1-78042-806-2

Nathalia Brodskaïa

THE FAUVES

CONTENTS A History of Fauvism

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Henri Matisse

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Maurice de Vlaminck

85

André Derain

95

Albert Marquet

105

Raoul Dufy

117

Othon Friesz

125

Henri Manguin

137

Kees Van Dongen

145

Georges Rouault

153

Jean Puy

159

Louis Valtat

167

Henri Le Fauconnier

175

René Seyssaud

181

Auguste Chabaud Georges Dupuis Henri Lebasque Pierre Girieud

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Notes

192

Index

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A HISTORY OF FAUVISM

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ecade follows decade in art, like waves breaking on a beach, each bringing its own “deposits” which, in turn, cover those that came before, dimming what had once seemed strikingly brilliant. But time does not work on everything with equal force. The art of the Fauves has not faded. Born within French painting at the turn of the century, Fauvism immediately demanded attention. The stormy reaction it provoked on its emergence in Paris in 1905 was, in itself, an acknowledgement of the strength of this new phenomenon in the fine arts. Fauvism was a real danger to academically congealed art calculated to appeal to the narrow-minded customer, to all painting which sought after prosperity by carefully absorbing innovation, turning it into the fashionable that would shock no-one through unwarranted boldness. Two or three years proved sufficient for the Fauvist painters to acquire — if not a permanent public, then at least their own dealers and admirers. The hostile voices which continued to make themselves heard were not enough to hinder the Fauves from competing freely with other trends. Each of them lived a life in keeping with his character and the unique features of his work, yet none of them experienced long years of hopeless poverty or a sense of impotence in the struggle with the might of official art. None of the Fauves left a studio full of works piled up and never sold — in this sense fate was kinder to them than to Gauguin, Van Gogh, or Toulouse-Lautrec. Even during their lifetimes, the Fauves’ paintings had found a place in the greatest private collections and then in museums, while they themselves were written about in the press and respected by contemporaries. The Fauves were acknowledged masters before they reached the age when grey locks and a noble bearing often stood substitute for true measures of talent. It might seem that when the general public would become more familiar with them, the intensity of the first reaction would diminish, but this was not the case. They are all long since gone, yet one still experiences a sense of shock on encountering their paintings. Fauvism received its name in 1905. In October of that year, a number of young painters — about ten altogether — presented their works at the Salon d’Automne in Paris. Their unusually bright works vibrant with colour were assembled in a single hall. In his account of the exhibition for the 27 October edition of the magazine Gil Blas, critic Louis Vauxcelles wrote: “In the centre of Room VII stands a child’s torso by Albert Marquet. The candour of this bust is striking in the midst of an orgy of pure colour: Donatello among the wild beasts.”1 This unexpected description from the pen of an art expert — “wild beasts,” fauves — proved so apt that within just a few days it was taken up by the press, its originator forgotten, and began a life of its own. In his account of the same exhibition in November 1905 another critic, Jean Aubry, already used the term as if it were self-explanatory: “At last, those that someone, I’ve forgotten who, called the wild beasts.”2 A simple explanation, then, in which chance played a significant role, and from that moment on, the names of Matisse, Derain, Vlaminck, Van Dongen, Camoin, Puy, Marquet, Manguin, Rouault, Dufy, Friesz, Valtat and a few others were generally associated with the word Fauvism. The very way in which the term originated is positive proof that the phenomenon it described already possessed definite recognizable characteristics. Nobody at that time, including Vauxcelles himself, was able to indicate its boundaries or predict the full

Henri Matisse, Goldfish, 1911. Oil on canvas, 147 x 98 cm. Pushkin Museum of Fine Arts, Moscow.

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Henri Matisse, Blue Pot and Lemon, 1897. Oil on canvas, 39 x 46.5 cm. State Hermitage Museum, Saint Petersburg.

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Henri Matisse, Fruits and Teapot, c. 1898. Oil on canvas, 38.5 x 46.5 cm. State Hermitage Museum, Saint Petersburg. André Derain, Still Life with Earthen Jug and White Napkin, c. 1912. Oil on canvas, 61 x 50 cm. State Hermitage Museum, Saint Petersburg. (p. 12) André Derain, Table and Chairs, 1912-1913. Oil on canvas, 88 x 86.5 cm. State Hermitage Museum, Saint Petersburg. (p. 13)

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significance of what had emerged. Most likely, the fact that interest in Fauvism has remained keen for more than three-quarters of a century causes us to reflect again on what essentially occurred at the Salon d’Automne and who it was that Vauxcelles christened “wild beasts.” In the second half of the twentieth century, reminiscences about the Fauves and the assessments of contemporaries inevitably gave way to the research of art-historians, yet this process revealed a surprising quality of Fauvism: even with the test of time, it remains as hard as ever to define precisely its chronology and characteristics which defy consistent classification. It is no coincidence that, despite the existence of an extensive literature, scholarly publications devoted to Fauvism appear with titles like The History of Fauvism Reviewed and Corrected or Fauvism Re-examined.3 It is no coincidence that, from the middle of the century on, one exhibition has followed another as testimony that interest in Fauvism now extends beyond Paris, beyond even Europe. Fauvism is linked to other artistic phenomena of the same period, while, time and again, scholars return to the assembly of canvases with which it all began in 1905. The reasons for this attention lie, most probably above all, in two obvious facts: with the passage of time, new aspects of the revolution which took place in painting at the beginning of the century are being discovered and, no less important, the “young wild beasts” of the opening years of the century all, without exception, became major figures in French twentieth-century painting. Cause enough to carry out one more examination of Fauvism as a conglomeration of unquestionable individual artistic talents and as an artistic association which brought about not the levelling of talents but, on the contrary, the development of each of the artists’ own creative strengths. For the outside observer, the background in Paris was still undoubtedly formed by the exhibitions of the official Salons, both by virtue of the great quantity of works presented at them, the large number of participants, and because of the predominant interest of the critics in them and their influence on the art market. This situation endured right up until the end of the nineteenth century and it seemed that nothing, even in the future, would be powerful enough to shake this stronghold of the Academy. It is enough to recall how many of the Impressionists, who were opposed on principle to academic art, nevertheless, dreamt of getting into the Salon since that meant hope, if not of being bought, then at least of becoming known to a certain extent within the circle of potential patrons. The situation changed somewhat in the final years of the century. An even greater number of artists were working outside the circle of the Salon. By the beginning of the twentieth century, earning a living was no longer directly linked to success at the Salons for the younger generation of artists. New art found its own dealers who acted as middle-men between buyers and artists. It is not possible, then, to say that at the time of the Fauves’ appearance, the Salons were still what they had been, although the changes that had taken place did not markedly affect their art. In 1905, as before, the Goupil publishing house produced magnificent surveys of the Salons with high-quality reproductions, while printed critical reviews of the Salon appeared in the Gazette des Beaux-Arts, L’Art et les artistes, and other respected periodicals. By this time, though, the grandeur verging on megalomania of the Salons, coupled with the conservative academic style, was often regarded with unconcealed irony. Even the Impressionists — men of the recent past, although by now they were one by one going to their graves — and the peaceful artists of the Nabis group who had not involved themselves in the struggle (Edouard Vuillard, Pierre Bonnard, Maurice Denis, and the others) found themselves in a position of resistance, yet could not discover another place to exhibit besides the often derided Salon des Indépendants.

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Henri Matisse, Painter’s Family, 1911. Oil on canvas, 143 x 194 cm. State Hermitage Museum, Saint Petersburg.

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By 1905, the Salon des Indépendants already had a history of its own. It had been founded in 1884 by artists rejected by the official Salon and was an exhibition which opened its doors to all the aggrieved without exception, promoting the principle of equality by not having a jury or awards. The established critics devoted much effort to creating a reputation for the Salon des Indépendants as they did acquiring a fantastic assemblage of works by certain cranks which might be visited so as to amuse oneself at the naive paintings of Douanier Rousseau and others like him. Yet the impenetrable conservatism of the official exhibitions was of unexpected service to the Salon des Indépendants: by the early twentieth century the latter’s emphatic objectivity, equally hospitable to all, had given way to a quite definite tendency. The path taken by this association of artists led to their Salon des Indépendants becoming a bastion of new trends; even the Impressionists found themselves no more welcome there than at the official exhibitions. However, at the moment, the fate of the Impressionists is not our concern. They could no longer be numbered among the ranks of the rejected while the younger generation badly needed an opportunity to demonstrate their art and to have

André Derain, Drying the Sails, 1905. Oil on canvas, 82 x 101 cm. Pushkin State Museum of Fine Arts, Moscow. Matisse Henri, View of Collioure, c. 1905. Oil on canvas, 59.5 x 73 cm State Hermitage Museum, Saint Petersburg.

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Henri Matisse, Woman on a Terrace, 1906. Oil on canvas, 65 x 80.5 cm. State Hermitage Museum, Saint Petersburg.

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Henri Matisse, Bouquet (Vase with Two Handles), 1907. Oil on canvas, 74 x 61 cm. State Hermitage Museum, Saint Petersburg. Henri Matisse, Bouquet of Flowers on a Veranda, c. 1912. Oil on canvas, 146 x 97 cm. State Hermitage Museum, Saint Petersburg. (p. 22) Henri Matisse, Calla Lilies, Irises and Mimosas, 1913. Oil on canvas, 145.5 x 97 cm. Pushkin State Museum of Fine Arts, Moscow. (p. 23)

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some sort of association to stand up in defence of it, even if that association was still without a definite aim or programme. In the early years of the twentieth century it was no longer possible to overlook the Salon des Indépendants. Even the lumbering state machinery was obliged, if not to reckon with it in the full sense of the word, then at least to make a gesture in its direction. Even earlier, the Direction des Beaux-Arts had sent its commissioners to the Salon des Indépendants to select pieces for purchase by the state, but they had never once found anything suitable. In 1902 the commissioner was Léonce Bénédit, curator of the Musée du Luxembourg, but he, too, found it possible to acquire only some “très delicates”4 sketches by Édouard Vuillard. Yet the choice at the 1902 Salon des Indépendants was a fairly wide one. Among the many others, there were almost forty works by five of the future Fauves led by Henri Matisse, and an attentive eye would have discovered them the year before as well. However, they were probably not yet perceived as a distinct phenomenon or even as an association, more so since they themselves did not make an aim of exhibiting together. In 1902 they failed not only to disturb anyone, but even to attract any great attention at all. The Salon des Indépendants was then simply one of the possible places for showing their work — a few of the future Fauves managed to get a work or two into the official Salon de la Société Nationale des Beaux-Arts (Van Dongen, Manguin) or even into the International Exhibition held in Venice (Dufy, Friesz, Rouault). The nascent Fauves had not been noticed due to the fact that they were still outsiders, even for the Salon des Indépendants where in the course of time they would establish their own authority and preferences. For the future Fauves, however, these first public appearances, for all their failure to create an impression, did play a major role: a process of formation was underway, formation not simply of their grouping, but of their artistic outlook. Their complex, yet definite conception of their own painting, three years later would attain not only perceptible form, but also recognition. On 31 October, in the Petit Palais, a new exhibition opened which had not previously existed — the Salon d’Automne. Also founded by painters who had been rejected by the official salons, this exhibition was, at the moment of its creation, a strange combination of the most progressive forces in art and others which were quite conservative by the standards of the time. In contrast to the Salon des Indépendants, here there was a jury, selected five days before the exhibition. The deputy chief curator of the Petit Palais, Yvanhoé Rambosson, managed to secure premises for the new salon in the basements of his museum. From the very onset, the exhibition committee included a number of Moreau’s former pupils — Georges Desvallières, Henri Matisse, Albert Marquet and Georges Rouault. In 1903 only four of the future Fauves exhibited here — Matisse, Marquet, Rouault and Manguin; however, these artists not only took advantage of a new opportunity to exhibit, but at once began to look on the Salon d’Automne as the main venue for presenting their work. In contrast to the already customary Salon des Indépendants, the Salon d’Automne attracted both visitors and critics through its intriguing novelty. So it became their principal exhibition place and this was the start of a new era in their lives. In 1904 and subsequent years, the Grand Palais accepted the Salon d’Automne. Additionally, 1904 saw an extensive and brilliant display of art by the future Fauves in some of the private galleries of Paris, Berthe Weill playing the leading roll in presenting these works, became effective propaganda centres for their art: some definite new trend was in the process of emerging from the latest art.

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Henri Matisse, Path in the Bois de Boulogne, 1902. Oil on canvas, 65 x 81.5 cm. Pushkin State Museum of Fine Arts, Moscow.

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The Salon des Indépendants, which opened on 24 March 1905, can be reckoned the first real display of Fauvist painting as a fully-formed phenomenon and was truly triumphal: one hundred works by fourteen artists, each of whom became a prominent figure in Fauvist painting! The group had grown in size by comparison with the previous year and the two new members who joined not only intensified the radiance of what already existed, but also injected some brilliant and original talent into it. After a century has gone by, it is hard to imagine whether without them the group of Fauves could have produced the bombshell in European art that was their emergence in 1905. The two figures in question are André Derain and Maurice de Vlaminck, two friends from the Paris suburb of Chatou who had become acquainted with Matisse as early as 1901 but had never before exhibited with him. Despite all that has been said, the Fauves were not recognized as a group in the spring of 1905. Naturally, the critic Roger-Marx cited the names of many of them together with highly sympathetic appraisals of their painting, showing respect for free manifestations of individuality, but his tastes were for art of a more customary kind, with clear links to Classical tradition. Due to this, Fauvism was not yet seen as a whole. The outlines of the new trend in general, and Fauvism in particular, emerge far more tangibly in the critical comments of those hostile to the Salon des Indépendants. First and foremost they were anarchists striving after the free expression of their individuality, taking a stand against tradition and generally accepted standards of beauty. Colour prevails over the rules of craftsmanship in their paintings, more than that, colour intoxicates them and the paints boil on their canvases. Even the immediate sources of their art become clear against the background of this Salon’s retrospectives. Even the idea of “wildness” had already been raised when it was applied to Van Gogh, but a single step remained before it was applied to the younger generation. Why was Fauvism not distinguished as a phenomenon and given its name here, at the Salon des Indépendants? Suffice it to say that in 1905, 4,269 works were on display, representing 669 artists, twice as many exhibits and exhibitors as the year before. How would the standard-sized canvases of young artists be noticed as the chief quality of which — colour — required light above all things for its effect! As a result, the display by an already completely formed group of a large number of works of what was fully-fledged Fauvist art at the 1905 Salon des Indépendants turned out to be no more than a dress rehearsal for the spectacle which took place a few months later at the Salon d’Automne. Little, it would seem, could have changed in that brief interval, nevertheless in the autumn the art of the “wild men” first made a real impact. Above all, the Salon d’Automne was truly their exhibition. As a result of the change of membership which took place in 1905, the committee now included, among many others, Matisse, Rouault, Roger-Marx, Vauxcelles and, as proved highly important, a loyal friend and pupil of Gustave Moreau — Georges Desvallières, who became vice-president of the Salon. Evidence of the growing authority of the Salon d’Automne can be found in the scale of the exhibition in 1905: it was enormous — 1,625 works (although still three times less than the Salon des Indépendants). Matisse’s group was represented by a smaller number of artists than at the Salon des Indépendants. First the dress rehearsal had given each of them the opportunity to understand that there were those close by who shared their ideas and that, taken together, their art acquired an impressive power — something the critics may have missed, but not the artists. United by common tastes and strivings, they, without being aware of it themselves, influenced each other, especially if we bear in mind that some of them had worked together previously.

André Derain, Martigues (Harbour in Provence), 1913. Oil on canvas, 141 x 90 cm. State Hermitage Museum, Saint Petersburg. (p. 26) André Derain, Landscape with a Boat by the Bank, c. 1915. Oil on canvas, 100 x 65 cm. State Hermitage Museum, Saint Petersburg. (p. 27)

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André Derain, Path in the Forest of Fontainebleau, 1911. Oil on canvas, 92 x 65 cm. Pushkin State Museum of Fine Arts, Moscow. (p. 28) André Derain, The Old Bridge, c. 1910. Oil on canvas, 73 x 92 cm. Pushkin State Museum of Fine Arts, Moscow. (p. 29) André Derain, The Castle or The New Castle in La Roche Guyon, c. 1910. Oil on canvas, 66 x 87 cm. Pushkin State Museum of Fine Arts, Moscow.

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Even more significant was the place they occupied at the exhibition of the Salon d’Automne. In memory of Moreau, Desvallières decided to bring his pupils together — the post of vice-president gave him great opportunities. And that is how the hall appeared, in which side by side were displayed canvases by Matisse, Marquet, Valtat, Manguin, Camoin, and probably also Matisse’s friend, Jean Puy. Two writers with attitudes toward the Fauves, which were poles apart, recognized them as a distinct group. Camille Mauclair acknowledged nothing which came after Impressionism, contemptuously called them all artists of the class of Ambroise Vollard, thinking of the “vulgar” tastes of the dealer who had presented Gauguin’s work to the Parisian public.5 While Maurice Denis, the Nabis artist, referred to them as Matisse’s group which seemed to him “the most lively, most new and most controversial.”6 The layout of the exhibition not only united the Fauves’ painting — at one and the same time, it set it in opposition to everything else which appeared at the Salon d’Automne. Without doubt, the contrast with the surroundings was intensified to the highest degree by the fact that they took the stage in closed ranks. Matisse, Derain, and Vlaminck were supported by Valtat charmed by the scorching Mediterranean sun, conveying the dazzling brilliance of the Bay of Anthéor, sharp shadows on yellow sand alongside an improbably blue sea, Manguin with landscapes of his beloved south, and even the restrained Marquet. Their painting brought out the very thing inherent in the medium: the capacity of oil paints to set in pastose clots or to spread in a thin layer making it possible for one colour to penetrate into another without losing its purity and resonance in the process. They were united by a genuine, feverish delight in the possibilities offered by a bare canvas and tubes of oil paint — one needs no more than to see Kees van Dongen’s Red Dancer (p. 147) and Maurice Vlaminck’s Barges on the Seine (p. 87) alongside each other. “In the orchestra I was conducting,” Vlaminck wrote in his old age, I decided in order to be heard to use only the trumpets, the cymbals, the bass drum, which, in this sphere of work, meant tubes of paint. Just as I would have instructed the musicians to blow the saxophone, cornet, and slide trombone with all their might, I made the tubes of paint burst upon my canvas and used nothing but vermilions, chromes, greens, and Prussian blue to snarl out what I wanted to say.7 Mockery and insults came from the most varied quarters and expressed themselves in different words, but the meaning boiled down to the same: the Fauves’ art was daubing, which had nothing in common with painting; it was denied a place among the creations of normal people and was thus worthy only to be the butt of malicious laughter. One of the critics, J. B. Hall, reviewing the source of the scandal defined the Fauvist hall at the exhibition as the focus “of pictorial perversion, of colour-madness, of the unspeakably bizarre fantasies of people who, if they are not mystificators, deserve the remedial regime of the École.”8 In contrast to the Impressionists or Manet, the Fauves belonged to the new twentiethcentury generation — mockery and insults did not hurt them, quite the opposite, they received them with satisfaction as a sign of the start of the battle they intended to wage. In Vlaminck’s words, their intentions included “composing triumphal revolutionary marches, to advance on the École des Beaux-Arts and to set fire to the ‘firemen’s house.”9 It must be admitted that in the heat of the battle which had commenced, they set fire to more than they intended. Only a very small amount was necessary for the artists of the official Salons to perish in the flames of the new art — their demise had been prepared by preceding generations. But the strength of the reaction to Matisse’s group set both the Nabis and the future innovators in the shade. This can be sensed clearly in

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the comments by critics of all shades of opinion, and, as usual, more vividly in the negative ones than in the positive. Besides this, Fauvism was perceived by enemies and friends alike as a new young force, the only movement which had really come to maturity and one which set itself in opposition to absolutely everything that had existed until that time, both in the “rightwing” camp and on the left. And despite the contradiction within the movement itself which the critics remarked on, it was a single whole. Even, so it would seem, the incompatible co-existence of spontaneity and rationality became its distinguishing feature, one which no one previously had ever displayed to such a degree. Even their demonstrative taking of the public stage without a leader or a programme, united only on the basis of “a spirit of intimate kinship,”10 was, in itself, the program to which most of the Fauvist artists were to adhere all their working lives, far beyond the brief time that is customarily called the Fauvist period. For the next three years the Fauves used both the Salon des Indépendants and the Salon d’Automne for joint displays of their work, each time effectively organizing their own exhibition within the general one. In 1906 they presented about 150 works at the Indépendants and slightly fewer at the Salon d’Automne; in 1907 and 1908, practically unchanged in terms of membership, the group exhibited again, maintaining the same ratio. No less than twice each year the galleries run by Berthe Weill and Druet exhibited Fauves either in groups or singly. Other Parisian dealers also turned their attentions to

Albert Marquet, Paris in Winter, The Quai Bourbon, 1907. Oil on canvas, 65 x 81 cm. Pushkin State Museum of Fine Arts, Moscow. Albert Marquet, The Pont Saint-Michel in Winter, 1908. Oil on canvas, 61 x 81 cm. Pushkin State Museum of Fine Arts, Moscow.

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Albert Marquet, Flood in Paris, c. 1910. Oil on canvas, 33 x 41 cm. Pushkin State Museum of Fine Arts, Moscow.

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Albert Marquet, The Pont Saint-Michel in Paris, The Quai des Augustins, 1908. Oil on canvas, 65 x 81 cm. Pushkin State Museum of Fine Arts, Moscow.

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André Derain, Houses on the Waterfront, 1910. Oil on canvas, 61 x 102.3 cm. State Hermitage Museum, Saint Petersburg. André Derain, Cliffs, 1912. Oil on canvas, 60.5 x 81 cm. State Hermitage Museum, Saint Petersburg.

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them: apart from his annual personal exhibition of René Seyssaud, in 1908 Bernheim Jeune presented about one hundred works by Kees van Dongen. From 1906, the Fauves began little by little to become known outside of France. In small groups, most frequently made up of pupils of Moreau, they displayed works at La Libre Esthétique exhibition in Brussels and in a private gallery in Vienna, while in 1910 the Manes Gallery arranged a display of Fauvist painting in Prague. At the 1909 Salon des Indépendants in Paris, the Fauves were again present in full number. At the Salon d’Automne, although their ranks had thinned some-what, they occupied the central position as before and were now perceived as a single whole. The peaceful position and conception about the freedom of art which now prevailed no longer prompted them into the fray. The Fauves began a gradual withdrawal — not from the course they had selected, nor from the principles of which they were convinced — from the struggle for a slice of the cake, which, until then, had been divided up by the overwhelming mass of official artists of every hue. One after another they acquired their own regular dealers who provided them with the material wherewithal to live and work; one after another they ceased presenting their creations at collective exhibitions. From 1910 onwards, the number participating in the Fauvist displays at both the Salon des Indépendants and the Salon d’Automne steadily declined. The peak of group appearances had passed. Even the name they had won themselves in 1905 did not have the former audacious ring to it: “...the painters who for some time were called les fauves” is how they are described in a very serious review written in the summer of 1910 by a critic close to them — Michel Puy, brother of the painter Jean Puy, who had constantly and closely observed the Fauves development over seven years of joint exhibitions. Nevertheless, he

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Louis Valtat, Girls Playing with a Lion Cub, c. 1905. Oil on canvas, 81.5 x 100.5 cm. State Hermitage Museum, Saint Petersburg.

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Louis Valtat, Sunlight under the Trees, c. 1908-1909. Oil on canvas, 66 x 82 cm. State Hermitage Museum, Saint Petersburg.

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Louis Valtat, The Farm, c. 1907. Oil on canvas, 82 x 100 cm. Pushkin State Museum of Fine Arts, Moscow.

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was not yet ready to draw a final conclusion as to the nature of Fauvism. But Puy considered its most important qualities to be already indisputable. Undoubtedly, the concept of Fauvism includes both, the brief period when the group as well as the qualities of colour common to the painting of the majority. But the mighty impulse, known as Fauvism, which became one of the strongest foundations of twentieth-century painting is in fact far more complex and encompasses a sum total of many qualities. It was precisely the variety of these which attracted artists of very different kinds to Fauvism. It embraced Matisse, who was engrossed in the science of his painting — in Salmon’s words, “a bearded painter in gold glasses, who brought a tone of severity, of professional gravity to the discussion,”11 and the spontaneous Vlaminck who provoked the envy of friends from Montmartre for just the opposite reason: “How does that bugger Vlaminck manage to be so modern without the help of the least intellect. On the contrary!”12 The ironical Van Dongen, susceptible to any kind of fame, be it scandalous or worldly, “...the painter of wenches, risen through the ranks to become portraitist to the great tarts, to achieve at last the glory of immortalizing dressmakers and duchesses who compete as patrons of the arts.”13 And finally, the humblest of the humble, Marquet, who confided to Vlaminck: “I want to become a cab driver! I would earn enough to keep me and while I was waiting for a fare I could draw...”14 We can extend the picture — and this unique combination of brilliant personalities already in itself becomes one of the characteristics of Fauvism. With this range of

Louis Valtat, In the South of France, c. 1908. Oil on canvas, 60 x 73.5 cm. State Hermitage Museum, Saint Petersburg. Henri Matisse, Nude, Black and Gold, 1908. Oil on canvas, 100 x 65 cm. State Hermitage Museum, Saint Petersburg. (p. 42) Henri Matisse, Seated Woman, 1908. Oil on canvas, 80.5 x 52 cm. State Hermitage Museum, Saint Petersburg. (p. 42) Henri Matisse, Nude, Study, 1908. Oil on canvas, 60.5 x 50 cm. State Hermitage Museum, Saint Petersburg. (p. 43)

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Henri Matisse, Girl with Tulips, 1910. Oil on canvas, 92 x 73.5 cm. State Hermitage Museum, Saint Petersburg. (p. 44) Henri Matisse, Woman in Green, 1909. Oil on canvas, 65 x 54 cm. State Hermitage Museum, Saint Petersburg. (p. 45) Henri Matisse, Spanish Girl with Tambourine, 1909. Oil on canvas, 92 x 73 cm. State Hermitage Museum, Saint Petersburg.

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characters, artistic and purely human, for all the highly subjective approach each of them had to evaluating life and art, we nevertheless find in their comments a unity and a certainty with regard to the value of certain characteristics which they jointly acquired. It not only forces us to listen to the creators of Fauvism, but in all probability in doing so we will also find the answer to the question of what the movement as a whole was about. The Fauves became the only association of artists in the history of art to join together in order to protest their right to work without any sort of common program, declaring their program to be complete freedom for each individual personality, complete creative independence both from any theoretical direction and from their like-minded friends. The turn of a century seems a mere symbolic boundary, yet much did indeed change at the dawn of the twentieth century. The international art world of Paris became so motley and varied, so independent with regard to official artistic life and traditional society that the idea of the artist becoming an outcast completely disappeared, faded into the past together with the nineteenth century. Now the right to individuality in art became something that went without saying and there was no longer any need to unite in defence of it. Nevertheless they did unite, despite Vlaminck’s vehement declaration of his dislike of associations, but not in the least so as to “cross a dangerous spot.” They needed to proclaim the creed of individual freedom loudly and that was best done in chorus. Because, if we try to be precise, it must be admitted that they formed neither a school, nor even a group as such. True, they were called Matisse’s group, but that designation appeared in the press only in order to have some way of setting them apart and defining them. There was no group; they never assembled especially to decide common questions. They did not arrange to dine as a group like the Nabis artists. They did not have a regular meeting place in some particular Parisian cafe. They met in each other’s studios, but there was no regularity with regard to who came. In their arguments about art, which were as much chance occurrences as they were natural ones, totally contradictory views were expressed. Although they were called Matisse’s group, the reason was not the role he played in the organization of the association. He did not dictate a program to anyone and did not oblige anyone to follow in his footsteps. The probable impetus for this was the system of painting which was specifically Matisse’s, the achievement of harmony in painting through the juxtaposition of patches of pure colour. And if a leader needed to be found, the most reliable thing was to let one’s choice settle on the artist whose works betrayed a theoretical basis. That, however, was no more than the view from outside. When we are thinking of the coming together of the Fauves, would it not make more sense to postulate the leadership of “le plus authentique des Fauves”15 [the most authentic Beasts]— Maurice de Vlaminck who himself declared: “Ce qu’est le fauvisme? C’est moi!”16 [What is Fauvism? It’s me!] And it was Vlaminck, of all people, who wanted to force others to follow his course, however paradoxical that may sound, since, after all his course was defined as the absolute non-subordination of the painterly element to any rules whatsoever. But Vlaminck was never the head of the group either — on account of his individualism, the very thing which he repeatedly proclaimed and in which, in point of fact, laid the cause of his joining his Fauvist friends. 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

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Henri Matisse, Seville Still Life, c. 1910-1911. Oil on canvas, 90 x 117 cm. State Hermitage Museum, Saint Petersburg.

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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 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

Henri Matisse, Still Life with Blue Tablecloth, 1909. Oil on canvas, 88.5 x 116 cm. State Hermitage Museum, Saint Petersburg.

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Henri Matisse, Statuette and Vases on Oriental Carpet or Still Life in Red of Venice, 1908. Oil on canvas, 89 x 104 cm. Pushkin State Museum of Fine Arts, Moscow.

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Henri Matisse, Spanish Still Life, c. 1910-1911. Oil on canvas, 89.5 x 116.3 cm. State Hermitage Museum, Saint Petersburg.

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Henri Matisse, Still Life with ‘The Dance’, 1909. Oil on canvas, 89.5 x 117.5 cm. State Hermitage Museum, Saint Petersburg.

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Henri Matisse, The Dance, 1909-1910. Oil on canvas, 260 x 391 cm. State Hermitage Museum, Saint Petersburg.

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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.”27 The range of the Fauves’ creativity is fairly broad, encompassing everything which came into an artist’s field of vision at the beginning of the twentieth century. Although they began as “anti-Nabis,” it was the Nabis who gave the Fauves an interest in applied and graphic art. These spheres had a need for real artists and Matisse’s generation possessed a large stock of energy. The primacy of colour in Fauvist painting prompted the idea of decorative art from the outset. Almost all the Fauves went through a phase of being interested in applied art, but neither Fauvism in general nor the artists themselves lost their individuality. None of the Fauves overlooked either the graphic arts, beginning with the newspaper and magazine caricatures with which many of them earned money in their youth, through the drawings, watercolours, and gouaches, which naturally accompanied their work throughout their lives, to prints and book illustrations. If one regards Fauvism only as a period of shared enthusiasm for the element of colour, graphic art would seem to have only a fairly tenuous connection with it. As a major phenomenon in the fine arts in general, as a continuation of the tendencies and lines of Romanticism in the twentieth century, Fauvism gave a powerful impulse to all forms of art. Even Derain’s quick pen-and-ink drawings carry in them a sense of vital force and thoroughness characteristic of the “school of Château.” Every one of Marquet’s landscape sketches possesses the constancy, modesty, and restraint which were the hallmark of his painting. Raoul Duty’s prints are sincere and naive. Vlaminck’s wood engravings are spontaneous, unrestrained, and energetic. As far as Matisse’s astonishing line is concerned, immediate and free, yet at the same time precise and thoroughly considered, it was perhaps the very thing which drew the critics’ attention to the particular role drawing played for the Fauves. The book called Jazz (Paris, 1937), which Matisse created at the end of his life, demonstrates in its integrity of conception and unity in the assembling of pictorial means all the qualities of Fauvism with no less force than the painting of his youth. Fauvism started life together with the twentieth century — a sober, technical century full of complex machinery and immense speeds, the most savage of wars, violence

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Henri Matisse, Conversation, 1908-1912. Oil on canvas, 177 x 217 cm. State Hermitage Museum, Saint Petersburg. Henri Matisse, Entrance to the Casbah, 1912-1913. Right Panel of the Moroccan Triptych. Oil on canvas, 116 x 80 cm. Pushkin State Museum of Fine Arts, Moscow. (p. 60) Henri Matisse, Arab Coffeehouse, 1913. Tempera on canvas, 176 x 210 cm. State Hermitage Museum, Saint Petersburg. (p. 61)

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against nature and man. In the twentieth century, in art, too, more or less significant new systems began to appear one after another, beginning with Cubism, Futurism, and Surrealism, systems less enduring but not in the slightest less strict and tyrannical than Classicism. The very fact of their presence, the formation of definite groupings around them naturally evoked reaction. In each generation there are young artists who tend towards intuitive, spontaneous, and sincere self-expression. It is a characteristic of many of them that they strive to link themselves with the Fauvist tradition — there are even echoes in the names they give themselves, be it the “Neue Wilden” in Germany or some groups that appeared in Paris, St Petersburg, or Moscow. For us, the Impressionists, Van Gogh, and Cézanne are almost as distant as Rembrandt and Rubens. They have entirely withdrawn to the museums, but Matisse, Vlaminck, Dufy, Van Dongen, Rouault, and Manguin belong to the twentieth century. Vlaminck said: I bequeath to young painters all the flowers of the fields, the banks of the streams, the clouds black and white which float above plains, rivers, forests, and great trees. ... These blessings, these inestimable blessings which with every season are reborn, blossom, tremble ... should we not on occasion recall that they are our inestimable heritage, the inspiration for masterpieces? Have you admired it enough? Have you tasted fully the emotion of the breaking dawn or the day that will never be seen again, so as to capture on your canvas a feeling profound and eternal?28

This sounds like the testament of the Fauves and of all those whose legacy they absorbed.

Henri Matisse, Portrait of Lydia Delectorskaya, 1947. Oil on canvas, 64.5 x 49.5 cm. State Hermitage Museum, Saint Petersburg. Henri Matisse, Young Woman in a Blue Blouse (Portrait of Lydia Delectorskaya), 1939. Oil on canvas, 35.4 x 27.3 cm. State Hermitage Museum, Saint Petersburg. Henri Matisse, Still Life with a Seashell on Black Marble, 1940. Oil on canvas, 54 x 81 cm. Pushkin State Museum of Fine Arts, Moscow. (pp. 64-65)

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HENRI MATISSE 1869-1954

“F

auvism is when there is a red,”29 said Henri Matisse concisely putting into words the most straightforward notion held of Fauvism. Matisse has in fact become Fauvism’s leader over the years as a result of his contemporaries and researchers persistently perpetuating such an idea. Consequently, Matisse’s work has been scoured through in a search for the ultimate Fauvist painting. Matisse never pretended or aspired to such a role, and on the question of what Fauvism represents in theory and in practice, he never came to a final conclusion. With the other Fauvists it can be argued that their art was dominated by either reason or emotion. Matisse’s intellect, however, continuously searched for a direction where both reason and emotion became reconciled so balance and order might be found. Henri Matisse was born on 31 December 1869 into a stallholder’s family in CateauCambrésis in northern France. He began his education at the secondary school in SaintQuentin and continued at Paris University where he read law. Upon graduating, he returned to Saint-Quentin where he worked in a lawyer’s office. During this period Matisse began to attend his first drawing classes and at the age of twenty, when an illness confined him to bed for nearly a year, he painted his first work. Returning to Paris in 1891, Matisse started to take lessons at the Académie Julian, working as a law tutor to help pay his way. In 1892 he abandoned Bouguereau’s totally uninspiring lessons and transferred to Gustave Moreau’s classes at the École des Beaux Arts. During the evenings, Matisse also attended classes in applied art and there he made friends with Albert Marquet, who soon also became a pupil of Moreau. It was at these classes that a group of artists came together and formed friendships that would endure all the trials and tribulations of their respective lives. From 1896 onwards, Matisse not only began to exhibit his work in official salons, but he also became a member of the Société Nationale des Beaux-Arts. He was interested in the Impressionists and he also began to travel, going to Brittany and even as far south as Corsica. At this time, too, he married and started a family. After Moreau’s death, Matisse briefly attended Professor Ferdinand Cormon’s classes, before joining Eugène Carrière Académie, where in 1901 he became friends with Jean Puy and Andre Derain. Matisse saw the twentieth century in as a father of three young children, a man in poor financial straits, an artist who had made only a limited name for himself, but nonetheless a highly respected member of the circle of artists in which he moved. In 1901 Matisse and his friends started to exhibit their work at the Salon des Indépendants and in Berthe Weill’s gallery. In 1903 they were involved in the founding of the Salon d’Automne, where, two years later, Vauxcelles would see their work and dub them “les fauves.” Exhibitions of Matisse followed each other around Europe and America. The paintings, sculptures, ceramics, and graphic works displayed attested to the amazing breadth of his creative abilities. As well as constantly painting, he simultaneously worked in theatrical design, sculpted, produced lithographs, and during the Second World War, Matisse illustrated a great number of books. In 1948 he presented his first exhibition of

Henri Matisse. Photograph.

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Henri Matisse, The Red Room (Harmony in Red), 1908. Oil on canvas, 180.5 x 221 cm. State Hermitage Museum, Saint Petersburg.

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Henri Matisse, Dishes and Fruit, c. 1901. Oil on canvas, 51 x 61.5 cm. State Hermitage Museum, Saint Petersburg.

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“Engraved Gouaches” which brilliantly rounded off his lifelong experimentation in the realm of colour. Henri Matisse died in 1954 in Nice, already acclaimed as a great artist. Matisse’s work undoubtedly shows how, in his nature, rational intellect maintained constant hold over creative talent. Perhaps it is this facet that makes his work so difficult to interpret. The decisiveness he so evidently showed in his art means that he left no loopholes through which his individual emotional world can be reached. Matisse was convinced that “an artist’s thinking should not be discussed without reference to the means he uses to depict it, because it is only of intrinsic value when it is borne out by these means... which as a result become fuller... just as the idea becomes more profound.” 30 The paintings Matisse produced between 1897 and 1901 demonstrate the mastery of his predecessors’ techniques, from the Impressionists through to Cézanne — bringing each one into line with his own creative spirit. Fascination with the colours used by the Impressionists on the flatness of an object in Cézanne’s work (e.g. Fruit and Coffeepot, c. 1898, Hermitage), could impede his consistent movement towards the creation of his own painterly space on the canvas. This is borne out by the following works which hang in the Hermitage: Crockery on a Table (1900), Dishes and Fruit (1901) and The Luxembourg Gardens (c. 1901) where the abstraction and the simplification of colour, which by 1908 became Matisse’s own distinctive hallmark, become ever more apparent. Such extreme emotional responses were rare occurrences for Matisse, though. The logic of Matisse’s artistic development can be quite clearly traced even within the limits

of the Russian collections. The still life Dishes and Fruit on a Red-and-Black Cloth (1906, Hermitage) heralds the beginning of a period when Matisse experimented with using large areas of colour to construct a space, which was almost as flat as the canvas and yet did not lose the feeling of three dimensions. In Statuette and Vases on an Oriental Carpet (p. 51) the carpet hanging on the wall and covering the table gave Matisse the opportunity to split the space he had created. In this painting the standing objects are the only means used to denote the transition from the horizontal surface to the vertical. However, in Fruit and a Bronze (1910, Pushkin Museum of Fine Arts) these objects — the jugs, vases, statue, and fruits — become more and more a part of the general ornamental structure, so that this relative boundary dividing the surface is gradually smoothed over, as it were. This searching process produced the painting The Red Room (pp. 68-69) which optimally attained the target Matisse had set himself. “I want a balanced art which is pure and tranquil. I want a man who’s tired, over-worked, and on his last legs to find peace and repose in my work.”31 So he said though: “The full potential of colour is only realized when it is organized, when it reflects the artist’s emotional intensity.”32 Matisse continued the process of subduing a large area of colour in Conversation (pp. 58-59). This painting goes the way of further simplification. Matisse discarded the pattern which adorns The Red Room, and now employed two areas of colour to disrupt the dark blue surface, one light blue with a white stripe and the other black. Red appears only as a fine sprinkling on the landscape seen through the window, considerably less in scale

Henri Matisse, Dishes and Fruit on a Red and Black Carpet (Le Tapis Rouge), 1906. Oil on canvas, 61 x 73 cm. State Hermitage Museum, Saint Petersburg.

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Henri Matisse, Music, 1910. Oil on canvas, 260 x 389 cm. State Hermitage Museum, Saint Petersburg.

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Henri Matisse, Nasturtiums with ‘Dance’ (II), 1912. Oil on canvas, 109.5 x 112 cm. Pushkin State Museum of Fine Arts, Moscow.

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than the use of dark blue on red in the preceding composition. Following Matisse’s work chronologically, one can see that each new painting is in its own way a result of his previous searches, as well as being a basis for further development. Harmony in Blue was described in the Salon d’Automne as “a decorative panel for a dining room.” Matisse’s own artistic method — the large colour surfaces correlating with pattern, — lead one to think of this painting in coexistence with architecture. The chain of thought which brought Matisse to The Dance (p. 57) and Music (pp. 72-73) can be traced within the two major Russian collections. In the 1908 painting, A Game of Boules, now in Hermitage, Matisse tried to resolve two issues: first, decorative abstraction with a strong concentration of colour — dark blue, green and ochre yellow; second, the creation on the surface of the canvas of a balanced form based upon the classical triangle. The direction taken in colour was continued in Nymph and Satyr (pp. 76-77). However, this painting also saw the introduction into the classical pyramid of crisp and vigorous arched lines capable of giving a painting balance in combination with the motion of the figures which it contains. Three paintings in Russian museums feature a depiction of a large sketch for The Dance in an Interior — a frequent motif for Matisse. They are Fruit, Flowers and the Dance (1909, Hermitage), Nasturtiums with ‘Dance’ (II) (1912) and Corner of the Artist’s Studio (1912, both in the Pushkin Museum of Fine Arts). In these works Matisse appears to have completely resolved how to depict the round dance in principle. The paintings Music and The Dance are inseparable parts of a single decorative concept. The intense wild rhythm of The Dance, which confronted visitors to Shchukin’s house on the first-floor landing, was supplanted by the conciliating peace of the second panel which hung on the next landing. In Music, the level of the horizon is higher and the relative weight of the green surface has been increased. The construction is reduced to a primitive pattern — the canvas is cut by a diagonal line of orange figures framed by two vertical lines. In reducing composition to a bare minimum, Matisse made changes directly on the canvas without the use of many preliminary sketches. What is remarkable in these paintings is that the alterations of one single element — the proportional relationship in the configuration of areas of colour results in dynamic motion in The Dance and a diametrically opposed stasis in Music. Particular attention should be paid to the Eastern art and its delicate beauty coupled with a free, simple pattern and colouring, which fed Matisse’s imagination at this stage in his artistic development. The Muslim art exhibitions held in Paris in 1903 and in Munich in 1910, and also his journeys to Spain and to North Africa, laid the foundation for the development of the arabesque in his work. This was never a factor with any of the other Fauvists — Japanese art had been assimilated by preceding generations, while the previously unknown works of Muslim art aroused no more than an impression of the exotic like the African statuettes which Vlaminck discovered. But there was Pablo Picasso, the only person in whom African art found a direct outlet and there was Henri Matisse who similarly went against the grain by finding inspiration in the Muslim art exhibitions held in Paris in 1903 and in Munich in 1910. The first of these, together with Matisse’s journeys to North Africa, prompted the introduction of concrete Eastern objects in his work — the decorative qualities of which furthered the compaction and simplification of space in his still-life pieces — rather than thoughts of any sort of new possibilities in painting. Matisse was not an impulsive man by nature, and a certain length of time was required for an idea to come to fruition in his art. The new impressions he gained at the Munich

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Henri Matisse, Nymph and Satyr, 1909. Oil on canvas, 89 x 117 cm. State Hermitage Museum, Saint Petersburg.

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Henri Matisse, Game of Bowls, 1908. Oil on canvas, 115 x 147 cm. State Hermitage Museum, Saint Petersburg.

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exhibition in 1910, and also from his journeys to Spain in 1910-1911 and to North Africa in 1910-1913 (in the company of Albert Marque and Charles Camoin) laid the foundation for the development of the arabesque in his work. The influence of the East finally separated Matisse’s decorative art not only from the Impressionists’ objective observation of nature but also from the intimate world of the Nabis, thus introducing one further element in the character of Fauvism. Later, Matisse will not use Eastern objects anymore, but any kind of fabric, fish in aquarium, even a pot of geraniums. Painter’s Family (pp. 14-15) is a concentrated expression of the principles of twentiethcentury European art, including Fauvism with its distinctive re-working of external influences. The painting’s motif derives directly from the work of the Nabis and even the execution in no way contradicts Édouard Vuillard’s principles, for the work clearly depicts man in his surroundings rather than being just a mere portrait. In painting the room — the carpet, couches, wallpaper, draughtboard, and objects on the mantelpiece — Matisse worked with the accuracy and spontaneity of a Primitive artist. At the same time he constructed an absolutely pure classical composition: the red patch of the boy’s clothing against a dark ground along the vertical axis is reinforced by the statuette on the mantelpiece; the centre of the work is framed by the rectangular fireplace and the two figures on its left and right sides. The sense of volume found in Classical paintings is here replaced by a flat area of colour. This is indeed the juncture where all the elements present in the painting begin to come together to form a decorative whole. Renaissance perspective is ultimately not ignored — it remains to give a three-dimensional aspect to the work, like all the real volumes subordinated to the flatness. Also present in this compositional play is the calligraphic beauty of Eastern miniatures. All the depiction of individual features like the pattern on the wallpaper and the dresses, the flowers and the design of the carpet loses its independent meaning, becoming merely one element on a colour arabesque. The painting acquires value not as an imitation of real life, but as a fresh reality created by the artist. Matisse’s experience of the natural world of the East, however, made him stray away from the abstract beauty of the arabesque. He began to paint portrait-format canvases with standing figures constructed on large areas of colour. The vibrant power of the distinctive Moroccan light and colours brought the artist fresh nuances in the combination of colour surfaces: not dark blue and red, but a cold green coupled with a subdued crimson, the crossing of which unexpectedly ignites in a sunny ochre — Moroccan Girl (Zorah Standing) (c. 1912, Hermitage). In the painting The Moroccan Amido (1911-1912, Hermitage), there is a very little green surrounded by a pale yellow and cold pink. Matisse seems to have succeeded in capturing on canvas the particular qualities of light within shadow which he found in North African interiors — a new non-European resonance of colour correlation. The Matisse collections in St Petersburg and Moscow are a sufficient, if not totally exhaustive, representation of his pre-1914 works. They contain not only all the genres he worked in, but also the main masterworks of this period. Matisse’s further creative development lies beyond the scope of the collections, with the exception of the four paintings presented by Lydia Delektorskaya. Of great value are Matisse’s book illustrations and sketches from the period of the Second World War. They are examples of the artistic freedom he achieved through stubborn work, a freedom which allowed him to construct a page, a book cover or a frontispiece, with just one line or a few vibrant patches of colour. A whole lifetime divides these works from his stormy youth as a “wild beast” and yet nevertheless these works remain intrinsically a part of Fauvism. Fauvism shaped all Matisse’s creative work and he himself defined it so well as: “the courage to find the purity of means.”33

Henri Matisse, Portrait of the Artist’s Wife, 1913. Oil on canvas, 146 x 97.7 cm. State Hermitage Museum, Saint Petersburg. (p. 80) Henri Matisse, Moroccan in Green, 1913. Oil on canvas, 146.5 x 97.7 cm. State Hermitage Museum, Saint Petersburg. (p. 81) Henri Matisse, Landscape viewed from a Window, 1912. Oil on canvas, 115 x 80 cm. Pushkin State Museum of Fine Arts, Moscow. (p. 82) Henri Matisse, On the Terrace, 1912. Oil on canvas, 115 x 100 cm. Pushkin State Museum of Fine Arts, Moscow. (p. 83)

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MAURICE DE VLAMINCK 1876-1958

“W

hat is Fauvism? It is me; it was my style of that time, my way of combined revolt and liberation, my self-chosen alienation from schools or anyone else; my blues, my reds, my yellows, my pure colours and unmixed tones.”34 Maurice de Vlaminck had some justification in making so bold a claim for himself: Fauvism really was Vlaminck’s inherent physical and spiritual nature and he retained throughout his life the integrity of his character as “the most authentic ‘wild beast’.”35 For Vlaminck, born into a family of music teachers in Paris on 4 August 1876, it seemed natural to earn a living through music. The friends of his youth remembered him playing the violin like a gypsy in the taverns of the Parisian suburbs. Moreover, he constantly had to give music lessons because, at the age of twenty-one, he was already married with two small children. Entirely self-taught, Vlaminck doubted that he could make a living from painting until his work attracted the attention and admiration of his fellow soldiers and until he met André Derain by coincidence, who became a real friend. Back during his army days in Brittany, Vlaminck fell in with an anarchist group, to whom he remained loyal for many years. And in 1901, Derain introduced Vlaminck to Henri Matisse who visited their Chatou studio to look at their work. Matisse, feeling a spiritual bond with them both, subsequently introduced them to another group of artists — pupils of Gustave Moreau — who, together with Vlaminck and Derain, were later to be known as the Fauvists. At the 1905 Salon d’Automne, the Fauves, especially Vlaminck and Matisse, were derided by the critics for their expressive style of drawing and their riotous use of colour and textured painting. Vlaminck, as an anarchist nihilist, was naturally delighted rather than dismayed at their response. He had so long held the “respectable” art establishment in contempt that he was flattered by their public rejection of him. Negative criticism in the press had also the added advantage of attracting the public’s attention. Up until this time he would very occasionally receive ridiculously small sums for his pictures, but in 1905 Ambroise Vollard bought the entire contents of his studio for 6,000 francs and signed him up for a five-year contract. The money enabled Vlaminck to buy a small house in Bougival for himself, his wife, and three daughters, and finally to dedicate himself solely to painting. In 1907 Vollard organized Vlaminck’s first one-man exhibition, but in 1912 he changed dealers signing a contract with Kahnweiler. In 1913, the last year of peace in Europe before the First World War, he and Derain went on a painting tour to the south of France. The war broke the momentum of his nascent artistic career. He was immediately mobilized and worked as a fitter at various factories not far from his home. Despite his

Maurice de Vlaminck. Photograph.

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Maurice de Vlaminck, A Barge on the Seine River, 1905-1906. Oil on canvas, 81 x 100 cm. Pushkin State Museum of Fine Arts, Moscow.

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exhaustion from the unaccustomed heavy labour, he would snatch time during breaks to paint the woods of Bougival or the banks of the Seine. During the final six months of the war Vlaminck worked in Paris, renting a studio in Montparnasse. The exhibition which took place in the Galerie Druet and proved highly successful allowed him to buy a farm called La Tourillière near the village of Rueil-la-Gadelière. Vlaminck’s life was a reflection of his character, straightforward, sincere, often unrestrained and harsh. He did not change over the years. Only one hour by car from Paris, on La Tourillière, he lived out his days with Berthe Combe and their two daughters, some-times going away but never for long, painting pictures and writing novels. He died from a serious illness in 1958 in the bosom of his family, mourned by friends and neighbours. Two early works, View of the Seine and Barges on the Seine, came into Ivan Morozov’s collection from Vollard and it is quite likely that they were in Vlaminck’s studio when Vollard bought the entire contents. View of the Seine (1906, Hermitage), depicting the river bank near the Chatou Bridge (a spot where Vlaminck often worked before moving to Bougival), is reminiscent of August Renoir’s Oarsmen at Chatou (1879, National Gallery, Washington), which Renoir painted at the same place during the Impressionist period. Renoir’s red boat cutting diagonally across the surface of the water possesses a resonance which seems impossible for the age of Impressionism. Vlaminck’s painting, constructed on the parallel, almost horizontal lines of the boats and bank, looks quieter and there are no figures in the foreground adding life. Yet, to use Vlaminck’s mode of expression, colour makes his painting a “fanfare” in contrast to Renoir’s “piano music.” His red comma of a boat burns in the centre against a river of shimmering blue, red, ochre and white vertical strokes: touches of red on the shore repeat the main melody and red reflections on the white sails quietly echo it again. The drawing of objects here is much generalized; the outlines of the trees and houses are highly abstract and the sail is inaccurately portrayed. The resulting effect is so powerful that, even after many decades, the pictures evoke the same feelings of impatience and trepidation which gripped the artist himself. Judging by the outlines of the shoreline buildings and factory chimneys, A Barge on the Seine (1905-1906, Pushkin State Museum of Fine Arts), was painted at Nanterre. It possesses an unusually uniform surface texture. The river and oppressive sky, streaked with clouds and industrial smoke, are worked in heavy, curling impasto strokes of pure blue, sometimes mixed with pure white, or in pure white alone. From a light-filled foreground, almost exclusively made up of whites, the colour, like sound, builds in intensity, step by step, note by note, towards blue, culminating in the upper part of the sky, where it reaches a seemingly impossible crescendo. After 1907, Vlaminck’s painting grew more pensive and peaceful: outright protest was giving way to reflection. The greatest change in the mood of the landscape results from textural changes. The former dynamic brushwork is replaced by a priming of warm hue over which he spread a thin layer of grey-green, which gives the painting its main tone. The surface of the canvas brings to mind the lessons provided by Cézanne whose influence can also clearly be felt in the compositional balance which even suggests the wings of a theatrical stage. It was precisely in this period that Vlaminck later admitted to having been a Cézannist — as, incidentally, were many of his fellow painters. Vlaminck learned from Cézanne to be more attentive to his subject, to grasp unique, previously unnoticed qualities. The intensity of Vlaminck’s palette diminished in

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Maurice de Vlaminck, Town, c. 1908-1909. Oil on canvas, 73.4 x 92.3 cm. State Hermitage Museum, Saint Petersburg.

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Maurice de Vlaminck, Bougival, c. 1909. Oil on canvas, 73 x 92 cm. State Hermitage Museum, Saint Petersburg.

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comparison to his previous works; he replaced blinding vermilions with ochres — and its juxtaposition with the purity of the adjacent greens creates that clarity of tone which the Cubists abandoned. The abstracted shapes — the massive crowns of the trees and the floating patches of reflections on the water — evoke a sense of unity and harmony in nature. The soft vibrant nuances of cold tones in the sky (Town) and dark green cypresses contrasted with the shining yellow of the houses and road fill the picture with the bright sunlight. The velvety transitions of the green-blue distances and the gentle rounded shapes of trees in the foreground lend a feeling of transparency to the air and a sense of cosiness to these places around Bougival which Vlaminck liked so much. Vlaminck changed as an artist just as any person inevitably in the course of a lifetime, and as nature itself changes. In the landscape River (c. 1912, Pushkin Museum of Fine Arts), he still retains the “stage-set” composition of his “Cézannist” phase but he introduces a new element — a river receding into the distance. A road or river running into the depth of a picture was to become one of Vlaminck’s favourite motifs. The crowns and trunks of the trees are still rounded and three-dimensional, the peaceful atmosphere of his Cézanne-like works — the foliage is rendered in frenetic diagonal dashes and the texture has become uneven, in a return to the manner of his early Fauvist work. The tensions in the painting are caused by a lack of harmony in nature: the powerful tree-trunks lean, bent or broken by fierce winds. It was not that the landscape itself had changed — the change was taking place in the artist’s state of mind. On the one hand, his volatile character would not allow him to sustain a peaceful mood for a long time; on the other, Vlaminck was more sensitive than anyone to the age in which he lived — perhaps because he always retained the purity of soul natural to a true “primitive.” In 1912, war hung in the very air of Europe. Vlaminck hated the meaningless slaughter of war and blamed civilization for it. The artist produced many landscapes in the 1920s and Landscape with a House on a Hill (p. 93) is probably not one of the more outstanding examples. Nevertheless, it reveals the maturity of the painter. From a fairly restrained palette of greens, browns, yellows and greys Vlaminck manages to extract a seemingly infinite range of rich colours and tones. A stripe of yellow ochre brings light into the picture. Vlaminck no longer squeezed primary colours directly from the tube onto the canvas, his approach was more orderly and methodical, but in spite of this, the colour is still the most dominant element of the work. It is often stated in biographies of Vlaminck that the 1950s saw him return to his wild, Fauvist style. But Landscape at Auvers (p. 92), Landscape with a House on a Hill and many others like them, painted at the same time, are proof that he never entirely abandoned his wild manner. Landscape at Auvers is Vlaminck, yet again, expressing his temperament through colour and surface texture. The linear design is slightly blurred and patches of green float slightly on the road. Soft brush movements describe the foliage of the trees, the impasto layers lying so thick that the very surface of the painting seems to vibrate. This work contains everything: the physical and plastic qualities of drawing and form; the transparent air; the infinite varieties of shade and hue evoking living nature and a sense of movement. Here, Vlaminck’s reds, blues, and whites sing out with full power. Truly, the primaries are not present in such abundance in his works of 1904-1906, but even if Vlaminck was older and what had previously appeared spontaneously was now the product of long consideration and much practice gained through living, his creative individuality was still the living incarnation of Fauvism.

Maurice de Vlaminck, Landscape with River, 1912. Oil on canvas, 83 x 102 cm. Pushkin State Museum of Fine Arts, Moscow.

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Maurice de Vlaminck, Landscape at Auvers, 1920s. Oil on canvas, 45 x 55 cm. Pushkin State Museum of Fine Arts, Moscow.

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Maurice de Vlaminck, Landscape with a House on the Hill, c. 1925-1926. Oil on canvas, 33 x 41 cm. State Hermitage Museum, Saint Petersburg.

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ANDRÉ DERAIN 1880-1954

“F

or us Fauvism was like an ordeal by fire... Our paints became sticks of dynamite. They were supposed to explode with light.”36 It cannot be claimed, though, that Derain simply allowed his artistic spirit to be carried away by a particular opinion. He now undoubtedly possessed a confident belief in his own artistic talent; he found a clear goal, something which his desire to paint had been lacking up until then. “The aim we are setting ourselves is happiness, a happiness that we must consistently create.”37 His paintings possessed Fauvism’s most salient hallmark — the intensity with which Derain’s colours flared up and burnt was such that it was hard to believe that they could die down just as suddenly as they ignited. Unlike Maurice de Vlaminck, though, Derain could not work relying solely on his powers of intuition and his temperament, nor could he convince himself, like Henri Manguin and Albert Marquet, that his choice of artistic direction completely suited his character. He was doomed to be tormented throughout his life, never satisfied with what he had accomplished. André Derain was born on 17 June 1880 in the Parisian suburb of Chatou. An important friendship was struck in 1898 when Derain met Vlaminck on a suburban train going from Paris to Chatou. The two immediately recognized the close similarity of their interests: they simply could not live without art. Both of them had grown up in poor, hard-working families. And both of them were large-framed and powerfully built; both were full of energy and a determination to upset conventions wherever possible. Derain was drawn to classical artistic methods, to museums, and to books: “I never lost touch with the Old Masters, and by the age of eighteen I was already familiar with all the existing reproductions of their masterpieces... for what benefit comes from a lack of culture?”38 Derain was assiduously copying the Ghirlandaios in the Louvre. It must, however, be said that the museum’s outraged visitors tried to prevent the artist’s attempts to turn the paintings into caricatures. “I was possessed by the Louvre,” wrote Derain, “and not a day would pass without my calling in there... I was in wild raptures about the Primitives. Their art seemed to me to be so true, pure and consummate.”39 Derain joined the Matisse group for the Salon d’Automne exhibition and even spent the summer of 1905 working with Matisse in Collioure and came away with a sense of the other’s exceptional personality and manner of painting and of the inner logic of his artistic system. 1907 was, in both private and creative terms, a milestone year for Derain. Most importantly, he married Alice Prense and moved to Montmartre, where he found himself in the midst of the Bateau Lavoir society of poets, artists and journalists. Additionally, around this time, seeing the birth of Cubism taking place in front of his own eyes probably is what made Derain take a jaundiced look at all his earlier work. Derain’s work as a creative artist now had to continue under the intense public gaze that came from being crowned one of France’s leading artists. In 1920, André Salmon invested Derain with the role of “regulator” in contemporary art, Picasso being the “animator.” Furthermore, Salmon considered that Derain was the figure to whom young artists looked for instruction. After having served throughout World War I, in 1919 Derain started to work in theatrical design and continued to work regularly for the

André Derain. Photograph.

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André Derain, Road in the Mountains, 1907. Oil on canvas, 81 x 100 cm. State Hermitage Museum, Saint Petersburg.

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André Derain, Port, c. 1905. Oil on canvas, 62 x 73 cm. State Hermitage Museum, Saint Petersburg.

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André Derain, Still Life in Front of the Window, 1912-1913. Oil on canvas, 128 x 79 cm. Pushkin State Museum of Fine Arts, Moscow.

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theatre for the rest of his life. He also began his career as a book illustrator for the literary genre. It is true that Derain exhibitions were held in Europe and the United States from 1922 right up until the outbreak of the Second World War. However, in Paris, Derain’s work was rarely shown after 1916. Derain’s work in Russian collections does not include anything he produced after 1914. Nevertheless, the collection can lay claim to being a definitive representation of the period it covers, because it is a true reflection of one of the most interesting parts of Derain’s life, the decade between 1905 and 1914. Derain, did then, indeed shut himself away from his friends, retiring to his studio and all the African sculptures, Chinese bronzes, Greek terracottas, and Renaissance ceramics that filled it. Later still, he became a hermit, living in his house in Chambourcy. In 1954, on 8 September, Derain died in a car crash. In 1905 Derain painted in Collioure. The bright southern light led him to make the staggering discovery that when colours are exceptionally intense, there are no dark shadows and they are full of colour reflexes. In effect Derain came to totally reject shadow as it was. A direct result of this new discovery was the landscape Fishing Boats (Drying the Sails). The burning southern colours and working alongside Matisse revolutionized Derain’s way of seeing colour. The sunlight that gives rise to colour reflexes is indeed blinding and shadows do cease to exist. Derain recreated this in his painting with a precisely constructed space, at the base of which lies the white primed canvas and freely distributed daubs of red, yellow and blue. Next to these lie red and dark blue strokes of the same elongated shape, which bring to mind the techniques used in Pointillism — the method Derain had devoted great attention to the colours when studying the works of Georges Seurat and Paul Signac. But even here the red does not burn with the intensity of Van Dongen, for in some miraculous way, the adjacent complementary colours preserve a certain restraint. The painting also has a very surprising background of rounded hills gently rendered with a subtle interweaving of warm and cold light blues, pinks, and pale violets. Derain’s tendency to pursue the creation of form and to subordinate his use of colour to this can clearly be seen even in 1905. This creative line was continued in Road in the Mountains (p. 96) which was painted in the south of France in Cassis. Even in the blinding Mediterranean light, the reds now turned into clay-like orange browns, with thick, cold greens and dark blues laid alongside. These are all bordered by a stylized black outline that creates an effect like a stained-glass window or a flat decorative carpet. In the years 1909-1910 Derain worked a great deal outdoors in the company of Picasso and Braque. The Castle (The New Castle in La Roche Guyon) (p. 31), shows the geometrical approach to form which brought Derain so very close to Cubism. He created on canvas something similar to the regular-irregular shapes found in rock crystal. His construction is so refined, so perfect that it quite simply compels the viewer to admire it. The contrast between the yellow walls and the blue of the sky creates the effect of the southern sun. It almost seems as if nature has escaped, torn the artist’s control, and is drawing him back to his Mediterranean landscape days. Grove (p. 102) and Tree-Trunks (p. 103), were without doubt painted from actual sketches. According to Apollinaire, after the impertinence of his youth, Derain turned to sobriety and a sense of moderation.40 Indeed, it is true that the grey-greens and browns removed from Derain’s work its previous lightness, while an almost metallic harshness is present in the construction of the tree trunks. The trees do, however, have some secret life of their own; the branches growing before our very eyes strain upwards, the trunks, on the other hand, bend towards the ground, which has been made uneven by their roots, and this motion suggests both suffering and resilience. Derain was saying that he saw no

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fundamental difference between the human being and the tree, for both are born, live, and die. He also drew a parallel between the rustling of leaves and human suffering and thinking. This expression of an inner emotion combined with an ascetic use of colour and form marked Derain’s movement away from the line taken by Picasso. It was only in 1910 that Derain, somewhat belatedly, turned his attention to the still life. Despite possessing a varied and exquisite collection of applied art from all around the world, Derain limited his still life subjects to bottles, clay pitchers, and glazed vases. The still life Table and Chairs (p. 13) represents a sort of culmination to Derain’s searches in the area of colour and form and is a synthesis of all he gained from Cézanne and from Cubism. A classical pyramid construction formed of pottery and porcelain tableware is positioned on a table that is angled to the viewer’s eye. The painting is wrought with exactly that balance of green and brown-reds that would appear dull if it were not for the play of the reflexes on the white porcelain. The years 1913-1914 are often termed Derain’s “Gothic period.” In the still life View from the Window (1912-1913, Pushkin Museum of Fine Arts), he used exactly the same objects as in previous works, but their meaning is changed in the new context of this composition. The perpendicular window frame which forms the axis of the painting seems to draw the tableware and the trees beyond the window with it in a vertical direction, evoking associations with Gothic church architecture. The Renaissance landscape with its playful clouds frozen beyond the window, reminds one more than anything of a theatrical backdrop. Derain creates a scene where the curtain is drawn up and the front stage flooded with the white of the primed, but unpainted canvas, while the objects are actors who people the stage. The Gothic “key” which Derain had discovered in the intervening years dominated form, colour, and even technique. Derain’s painting was founded on all his immense stock of erudition, his knowledge. Derain’s mind was attracted by the erudite path but the world he saw was too gloomy and hopeless, he himself too prey to the torments of discontent and duality. The atmosphere in pre-war Europe — a feeling of instability and impending doom — intensified Derain’s growing spiritual crisis: “The further I go the more alone I am. And I fear to be abandoned completely.”41 In Saturday (c. 1913, Pushkin Museum of Fine Arts), life is concentrated in the darkness of the room where Derain’s dull greens and dark browns seem almost like flashes of light amongst the hopeless blackness of this enclosed world. The folds of needlework in the woman’s hands seem to be a frozen cascade of water. A silence of foreboding hangs over the scene, with life paralyzed in expectation of a tragic denouement. The 1914, Portrait of a Girl in Black (c. 1913-1914, Hermitage) is the final result of a number of portraits that Derain painted of the same model. This earlier would seem to have achieved Derain’s aim completely, the model’s individuality being brought out, the exclusion of everything secondary and incidental, as well as the attainment of a concise means of expression where line and colour create a classical purity and beauty. In the second portrait, little appears to have changed — only now the figure has been removed a very long way from the viewer, almost as if viewed through the wrong end of a pair of binoculars. Emptiness has appeared — a cold, pale blue space. The carefully modelled face with its large constituent forms has taken on the immobility of a wooden sculpture, thereby intensifying the harshness of the lace collar and the back of the chair. The relationship between the figure and the space, combined with this passionless inertia, impart such strength of expression to the subject’s appearance that the portrait has almost become an icon of loneliness.

André Derain, Portrait of an Unknown Man Reading a Newspaper (Chevalier X), 1911-1914. Oil on canvas, 162.5 x 97.5 cm. State Hermitage Museum, Saint Petersburg. André Derain, Grove, c. 1912. Oil on canvas, 116.5 x 81.3 cm. State Hermitage Museum, Saint Petersburg. (p. 102) André Derain, Tree-Trunks, 1912-1913. Oil on canvas, 92 x 73 cm. Pushkin State Museum of Fine Arts, Moscow. (p. 103)

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ALBERT MARQUET 1875-1947

A

Fauve from the very outset, Albert Marquet was also an original Fauve, and moreover, an independent Fauve who in many ways distanced himself from Fauvism.”42 Bernard Dorival wrote those words in 1944, while Marquet was still alive and no one since has managed to define more precisely the artist’s relationship to Fauvism. “Marquet, as it has been observed and is patently evident, has nothing of the Fauve about him,” Vauxcelles wrote.43 “He does not roar, he speaks and he has always spoken in a precisely measured manner; romantic truculence is not a characteristic of the ironical man from Bordeaux. ... He only entered the ‘central cage’ at the 1905 Salon d’Automne so as not to abandon his pals...” Vauxcelles could find nothing in common between Marquet and the Fauves. “Of all the Fauves, he was the least violent,”44 Fritz Vanderpyl wrote about Marquet, and it is hard not to agree with him. It really is the case that Marquet’s painting never possessed the violent energy of Vlaminck and that Matisse’s red never rode triumphantly through it. The texture of his painting never displayed that anarchic freedom which also became one of the outward signs of Fauvism. Albert Marquet was born on 27 March 1875 into the family of a railway clerk in Bordeaux. The taste for drawing which Albert displayed in his childhood, at the secondary school, and his evident talent prompted his mother to conceive the idea of moving to Paris where he entered, in 1890, the École des Arts Décoratifs. It was there that Marquet met Matisse who was six years older than him and for that reason immediately adopted a protective attitude towards him. But with Marquet that was no easy matter: even then his character was so firmly established and independent that it was impossible to make him go against his own wishes. When, in 1895, he enrolled at the École des Beaux-Arts with Matisse, that independence came out in his painting. Professor Gustave Moreau called Marquet “mon ennemi intime” [my intimate enemy], an epithet which expressed both his inability to overcome Marquet’s stubborn spirit of contradiction and his fondness for this pupil. Marquet had a reverence for the professor, as they all did, but his acute and specific gift as a draughtsman irresistibly distracted him away from academic lessons and the copying of the classics which Moreau so insistently preached, towards living scenes of the life he saw in the street. Marquet made copies in the Louvre like all his fellow-pupils; but did not Moreau himself advise them not to waste their youth in a studio but to become themselves in the world beyond? The professor’s rare tact as a teacher perhaps played a stronger role for Marquet than for Matisse or Rouault and when Moreau died in 1898, Marquet left the École des BeauxArts and for a time attended the independent Académie Carrière, along with Matisse. By now, though, he was already a professionally mature artist and he presented his works in several places: In 1903 at Berthe Weill and at the 1905 Salon d’Automne where

Albert Marquet. Photograph.

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Albert Marquet, Sun Over Paris (Sun Seen Through the Trees), c. 1910. Oil on canvas, 65 x 89 cm. Pushkin State Museum of Fine Arts, Moscow.

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Albert Marquet, View of the Seine and the Monument to Henri IV, c. 1906. Oil on canvas, 65.5 x 81 cm. State Hermitage Museum, Saint Petersburg.

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Albert Marquet, Rainy Day. Notre Dame du Paris, 1910. Oil on canvas, 81 x 66 cm. State Hermitage Museum, Saint Petersburg.

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Marquet was among the few about whom the critics wrote in completely favourable terms — he was mentioned by François Monod in his review for the magazine Art et Décoration, while G. Kahn in La Revue illustrée expressed his delight at Marquet’s work, as did Camille Mauclair who was anything but sympathetic to the Fauves.45 Marquet’s painting never outraged either the critics or the public. Nevertheless, the epithet “Fauve” suited Marquet as naturally as everything he did throughout a life in which he stood by the creative principle and bonds of friendship forged at the beginning of the century. In the years that followed, Marquet exhibited jointly with other Fauves in Brussels, Vienna, and Prague. For the majority of the Fauves, landscape was of primary importance and in Marquet’s case it became virtually the only genre in his painting. On rare occasions he turned his hand to the nude (under the influence of Matisse), the portrait, and the still life. Trips undertaken with his friends during this period brought him then to those places which would subsequently become the subjects of his landscapes. He journeyed all over France from Normandy to the Cote d’Azur and in London, Hamburg, Rotterdam, Naples, and Tangiers, where in January 1913 he met up with Camoin and Matisse. Like Matisse, Marquet was exempted from military service, and he spent the years of the First World War in the south of France. He worked in Collioure, the Estaque range and in Marseilles, where, in 1916, a friend let Marquet have a comfortable studio in which he established himself for a period of three years. His contract with Druet meant that he did not have to worry about money. The southern light completely captivated the artist and the end of the war found Marquet longing for North Africa — his pre-war trip had evoked a desire to work under the blazing sun there. In 1920 Marquet set off for Algeria, his decision backed by the advice of doctors who recommended that after a severe bout of influenza, he spend the winter in southern climes rather than in Paris. One of the letters of recommendation with which Marquet’s friends furnished him was addressed to Marcelle Martinet, a French woman who lived in Algeria who helped him to discover and experience the life of the Arabic world and who he married in 1923. Marquet and his wife then spent their time between Paris and Alger, as well as travelling widely. The artist introduced into his painting the landscapes of Tunisia, Norway, Egypt, Spain, Romania, and the Soviet Union. His last pre-war trips took him to Italy, Switzerland, the Netherlands, and Sweden. In 1945 the couple returned to the apartment at I Rue Dauphine. It was there that the artist died on 14 June 1947. Marquet was not fond of discussing his art; for him, talking to journalists was a torment: “I don’t know how to write or speak, only how to paint and draw. Look at what I have done. Either I managed to express myself or I failed. In any case, if you can’t understand, whether through my fault or yours, there is nothing more I can do.”46 Marquet’s painting is as restrained as he himself was, but it is far from being rigid. When he was painting, his shyness receded and self-confidence appeared. In his landscapes one never senses the influence of other artists, even those close to him. While he had a warm affection and respect for Paul Signac, Neo-lmpressionism never influenced him for a moment; Cézanne impressed him no less than the others, yet he did not become a Cézannist. Marquet created his own brand of landscape in his painting and it was in that fact above all that his natural affinity with Fauvism expressed itself. The collection to be found in the Russian museums reveals not the artist’s evolution, but the specific world of his landscape just mentioned.

Albert Marquet, View of Saint-Jean-de-Luz, 1907. Oil on canvas, 60 x 81 cm. State Hermitage Museum, Saint Petersburg.

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Albert Marquet, Louvre Embankment and the New Bridge, 1906. Oil on canvas, 60 x 73 cm. State Hermitage Museum, Saint Petersburg.

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The landscape The Quai du Louvre (c. 1907, Pushkin Museum of Fine Arts) was painted at the time of the Fauves most striking public demonstrations. The red colour appears here only in the form of a few horizontal strokes in the reflection of the sun, but they too grow dim on the whitish water. Everything else is shrouded in a cold grey mist. The critic Marc Sembat wrote that he had expressed his delight at the light in a painting by Cross in the Galerie Druet to which Druet retorted: “That’s not light, but colour. This is light,” and showed him a canvas by Marquet painted without reds and greens but radiating light.47 The same miracle takes place in his autumn and winter Parisian townscapes. Marquet is often compared to the Impressionists, since the motif of fog or snow attracted him as much as it did them. It really is the case that, of the generation born in the 1870s, he was the only one who understood and empathized with the Impressionists, although he did not himself take that course. Marcelle Marquet recollected that when he came home after an operation on 31 January 1947, the artist straightaway took up his brush so as to capture the effect of falling snow. The art of the early twentieth century strove not towards analysis but towards abstraction. But in his painting, Marquet proved more complex than many of his contemporaries. A veil of snow or the haze of rain provided him with the starting tone of a painting. A viewpoint from above makes it possible to embrace a large expanse of the scene with the eye. People often explain the use of this device in the Parisian views by the fact that the artist painted from his window, but he used a similar viewpoint with a high horizon throughout his paintings. On an abstracted tonal surface, he usually constructed perspective by the classical means — two or three lines converging towards the horizon. There is no room in this system for value — each patch of colour stands alone and only the freely drawn line gives it variety. The Mediterranean landscapes Harbour at Menton (1905) and View of Saint-Jean-de-Luz (p. 110) were painted in keeping with the Fauvist colourist tendency. But in order to unite sea and sky with a blinding pure shade of pale blue, Marquet needed the southern sun, something without which Vlaminck managed perfectly well when depicting the bright blue in his Barge on the Seine (p. 87). But in the end result, colour in Marquet’s work is saturated for the same purpose: to create an impression of an integrity of light which for him was more important than colour in itself. In the Neapolitan views he painted a few years later — Bay of Naples (p. 114) and Vesuvius (p. 115), light has conquered colour. The means he uses are minimal: blue, often mixed with ceruse, white, which subjugates both sky and sea, and the black boats gliding across the water. The unity of light is so natural that it is not disturbed by the texture of the impressionistically separated brushwork in the foreground — it introduces a feeling of calm, rhythmical motion into the painting. One of the most remarkable works in the Russian collections is The Port of Hamburg (1909, Hermitage) where a warm pink colour lying in a single large patch on the walls of the buildings, the surface of the water and the fringe of the sky above the horizon conveys the particular northern light intensified by the red stripe of the boat in the centre. In the accomplishment of the task which Manguin held to be the main one for the Fauves — the intensification of light in painting — it was Marquet who probably played the main role. Marquet’s world fitted smoothly into the general picture of Fauvism — without the work of any one of the “trio” (Matisse, Marquet, and Manguin) that picture would not only be incomplete, but would fail to reflect all aspects of a manysided phenomenon.

Albert Marquet, Harbour at Menton, 1905. Oil on canvas, 65 x 81.5 cm. State Hermitage Museum, Saint Petersburg.

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Albert Marquet, Bay of Naples, 1909. Oil on canvas, 62 x 80.3 cm. State Hermitage Museum, Saint Petersburg.

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Albert Marquet, Vesuvius, c. 1909. Oil on canvas, 61 x 80 cm. Pushkin State Museum of Fine Arts, Moscow.

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RAOUL DUFY 1877-1953

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aurice de Vlaminck, the “wildest” of the Fauves, was enraptured by Dufy: “The work of Raoul Dufy is more unquestionable and more original than that of Henri Matisse. Dufy is not tempted like Matisse by the solution of plastic problems. He quite simply thinks of his painting. Like the palm-reader who uses the lines on a woman’s hand to discover her character, Raoul Dufy uses the lines of his drawing to convey his vision of things, to describe the gestures and motion of what he sees living and stirring.... For him everything is permitted; he enjoys complete liberty and makes the most of it. The subject does not hamper him.”48 Dufy was close to Vlaminck in the absolute freedom of his painting. He saw the world around him primarily in terms of colour. He was never indifferent to that world and, like Vlaminck, he loved flowers, trees, birds, and butterflies. Dufy did not resemble anyone else. He made contact with his future-Fauvist friends in 1900 precisely because at the age of twenty-three, he possessed the same qualities which were to become their common property. Just like the other Fauves, he was opposed on principle to theories and groupings; like all of them, to the end of his life he valued the friendship and preserved the attachments of his youth. At the same time as his friends, Dufy became carried away by the lessons of Cézanne and made tentative steps in Cubism under the influence of his friend and Montmartre neighbour, Pablo Picasso. Like the majority of the Fauves, Dufy then rejected that course. Possibly their greatest achievement lay in their ability to resist temptations, to preserve and express to the utmost the creative powers with which nature had endowed them. “Primitive and unsophisticated by virtue of his intelligence, culture, and character, Dufy reminds one of a child,” Dorival wrote, “a child who describes the world in his own way and with such charm that the grown-ups forgive the inaccuracies in the account, and therein lies the secret of his poetry.”49 One further quality of Dufy’s art sets him apart from the rest of the Fauves. Following in the footsteps of the Nabis group, each of the Fauvist artists made his contribution to book illustration, scenography and ceramics. Yet, for most of them, painting remained the priority and their interest in various forms of applied art only lasted for brief periods. Examining Dufy’s artistic career, however, it is hard to say what he gave absolute preference to. True, it has been supposed that his collaboration with the couturier Paul Poiret was occasioned by his need to make a living, but, however it came about, their joint efforts marked the beginning of a whole flood of patterned fabrics which clothed Parisian ladies and found their way into homes in the form of curtains, lampshades, upholstery and even wall decorations. Dufy’s flowers, butterflies, ears of corn, birds and seashells were as natural worked in silk as they were on the clay body of a vase or a woodcut print. Dufy’s imagination produced indoor ceramic gardens, carpets, and stage designs

Raoul Dufy. Photograph.

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Raoul Dufy, The Antibes, 1926. Gouache and watercolour on paper, 50.6 x 65.5 cm. Pushkin State Museum of Fine Arts, Moscow.

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which echo the motifs of his painting. And who can precisely establish to what extent the one influenced the other: it may well be the case that the sea, which towers up like a wall on Dufy’s canvases, or his brushstrokes when painting in oils — which Pierre Courthion compared to shorthand symbols50 — if they did not have their origin in applied art, at the least drew much from it. The process of tapestrymaking concerned the artist no less than the technology of painting in oils which would maintain their qualities for centuries. Raoul Dufy was born in Le Havre on 3 June 1877. One of nine children in the family, he retained a love of music all his life. At the age of fifteen he had to go out and earn his living. His work for a Swiss coffee merchant’s firm was connected with the sea and ships which he drew and painted in his leisure hours. In 1900, after he had done his military service, Dufy was awarded a grant to study art at the École des Beaux-Arts in Paris. In 1892 Dufy began to take evening classes in painting under Professor Charles Lhuillier at the École Municipale des Beaux-Arts in Le Havre, which was where he met Othon Friesz and became acquainted with the group of artists which had by that time formed around Matisse. In 1901 Dufy exhibited one painting at the Salon des Artistes Français; in 1902 he sold his first pastel to Berthe Weill; from 1903 onwards he exhibited at the Salon des Indépendants and at group exhibitions in the Galerie Berthe Weill. In 1905 Dufy displayed his work at the Salon des Indépendants and at the Salon d’Automne where he earned himself the name of Fauve together with the others. In 1906, Berthe Weill organized his first one-man exhibition. During this period, Dufy settled on Montmartre, opposite the Bateau Lavoir, in a studio which Friesz had given up in his favour. In 1908 Dufy worked at I’Estaque together with Georges Braque; in 1909 he viewed the German Expressionists in Munich with Friesz. His contacts with Picasso, Braque, and Juan Gris provided the impetus for Cubism to make an appearance in his painting. But Dufy could not quickly sell these works and ran short of money and it was it was his meeting with Paul Poiret in 1911 which saved him from poverty. It was at this time that the artist produced his first woodcuts, as illustrations to poems by Fernand Fleuret and Guillaume Apollinaire. Those were followed by illustrations of Emile Verhaeren, Remy de Gourmont and others. But it was Dufy’s meeting with Paul Poiret in 1911 which saved him from poverty. With the couturier’s financial support he began to paint fabrics, an experiment which he then continued at the BianchiniFérier factory. During the First World War, Dufy worked for a time at the Musée de la Guerre in Paris, buying works from other artists. In the 1920s and 1930s Dufy travelled to Italy, Morocco, and America. In 1921 he gave his first exhibition of fabrics at the Salon des Artistes Décorateurs. From 1921 onwards the Galerie Bernheim-Jeune organized a personal exhibition of his art almost every year. Dufy did work for the theatre, produced ceramics and illustrations, painted murals for the Paris apartment of Doctor Viard, cartoons of tapestries for La Manufacture de Beauvais, a design for the decor of the swimming-pool on board the liner Normandie and, finally, an immense mural in the electricity pavilion at the 1937 World Fair. A series of his exhibitions toured Europe and America before and during the Second World War when Dufy moved to the south of France, away from the German occupation. Even then, Dufy was receiving treatment for arthritis which plagued him as it had Renoir, an artist of whom he was especially fond. In 1951 Dufy produced his own version of Renoir’s composition Balle du Moulin de la Galette (1876, Musée d’Orsay, Paris) in an almost symbolic gesture: tormented but not broken by the

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Raoul Dufy, 14 July in Deauville, 1933. Oil on canvas, 38 x 92 cm. Pushkin State Museum of Fine Arts, Moscow.

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illness, Dufy — like Renoir — managed to invest his painting with joy right up to the end. Dufy died on 23 March 1953 in Forcalquier. It was no mere chance that Dufy produced his own Balle du Moulin de la Galette — the artist had a need to say a similar thing, but in his own, different language. Woman Seated (1904, Hermitage) also comes across as a personal reworking of a motif by Renoir. The fascination of the living world gives way to a light-hearted grotesque thanks to the artist’s decorative imagination. The blues, reds, and oranges resound with full force; the brush draws gently and whimsically on the coloured surface. Here Dufy gave physical expression to the revelation he had experienced on first encountering Matisse’s painting Luxe. Calme et Volupté (1904, Musée d’Orsay, Paris): “Standing in front of that painting, I understood all the new principles of painting,” Dufy said. “The realism of the Impressionists lost its charm for me in contemplation of that miracle of the imagination translated into design and colour.”51 The second painting by Dufy, 14 July at Deauville (pp. 120-121), was donated to the Moscow museum in 1969 by the collector M. Kaganovitch, in whose Paris gallery a Dufy exhibition was held in 1936. A favourite motif of Dufy’s since childhood — the Normandy coast, the sea and ships — is painted in the landscape format often used by the artist. This painting is a concentration of many things: Dufy’s attitude to the natural world and to colour, the poetic nature of his painting, decorativeness, and, most importantly, the feeling of joy which radiates from all his work. The sprinklings of bright colour in the blue milieu — red, white, and yellow flags and the light house — create an impression of a colourful festival or a child’s fairy-tale. At the base of the work is the same pale blue colour in which, according to his biographer, Berr de Turrique, Dufy once painted a wall of his room so as always to have the sky before his eyes. This intense azure lies in a dense layer on the canvas, covering its whole surface and establishing a unity of water, sky, and air. It is sometimes considered that Dufy was the most Impressionistic among the Fauves. This painting demonstrates once again the course Dufy took in the reevaluation of Impressionism: the colour of objects does not alter as a result of light or atmospheric phenomena — it is constant and abstract. The dark blue on the water lies above the azure without any vibration — this is not in the least a product of the richness of colour reflexes in shadow, but an abstractly painted surface. In the shadow of the boats this surface becomes grey. The colour on the canvas is not the colour of the object — the patch does not coincide with the contours of the boat. Dufy once said that he kept seeing the colour of a dress long after the girl had walked past, from which he concluded that line moves faster than colour. Line was also exceptionally important to him: easy and light-hearted, it marks out houses, trees, and reflections. It gives Dufy’s painting the decorativeness of a carpet, just as it gives his carpets the poetry of painting. Dufy’s charming work, so intuitive at first glance, conceals within it many secrets. One recalls André Gide’s retort, made at the 1905 Salon d’Automne, that in the case of the Fauves, everything was the product of theory and intuition had nothing to do with it. Nevertheless, Dufy’s intuitiveness is striking — without it, his art would lose its charm — and no one would dare to question it. But the comparison of these two paintings with an interval of 30 years between them tells us a lot. Before our eyes immediacy of observation and the revelation of intuition are summarized, then generalized and almost transformed into a collection of formulae. Was that not perhaps the greatest expression of Duty’s loyalty to the principle of his youthful Fauvism?

Raoul Dufy, Portrait of Suzanne Dufy, the Artist’s Sister, 1904. Oil on canvas, 46 x 33 cm. State Hermitage Museum, Saint Petersburg.

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OTHON FRIESZ 1879-1949

“W

hat about Fauvism?” the journalist André Warnod asked Othon Friesz. “It began about 1902 or 1903. We gathered at Matisse’s, at his studio on the Quai Saint-Michel, to discuss the theories of it. We wanted to get away from Impressionism, to do something else. We sought to convey the equivalent of sunlight in paints. Sometimes people say that theories are no good for anything. But I don’t agree. We knew where we were going; we had a goal. We admired Renoir, Claude Monet, Sisley, but we understood that we had to do something else. The experiments of the Neo-lmpressionists, Cross as well as Signac, did not satisfy us. We wanted to speak the language of pure colours, to balance those colours, to seek out their values. It was inspiring. We wanted to recreate painting for our own use. We were entering into a wholly new domain.”52 In this reply to Warnod’s question, given a few years before his death, Friesz spoke of his conscious coming together with his Fauvist friends. He considered the epithet “fauve” justly deserved and he took a pride in it. His firm and loyal bonds of friendship with the Fauves went back to his time at the École des Beaux-Arts and to their joint appearances at exhibitions, but his colours never resounded like those of Vlaminck. Friesz’s physical health and strength found expression rather in the delight he took in the plasticity of the paints themselves and the fairly coarse surface of the paint-covered canvas concealed the most delicate work in nuances of beige and blue-green tones. Friesz had no conviction that it was necessary to paint everything with only one red or one blue like the young Maurice de Vlaminck or André Derain — for him, community with the Fauves displayed itself in the search for light through colour, in expression by means of generalization and, above all, in a jealous regard for his own individuality as a painter. Othon (Emile-Othon) Friesz was born on 6 February 1879 in Le Havre, the town of Eugène Boudin and Claude Monet. Friesz’s friends recall him looking like a Viking. The family was originally from Alsace. His grandfather was a sea-captain and had passed the profession on to his son. Othon, too, was expected to follow in the family line, but fate decided otherwise. His mother imbued him with a love of music and art and at the age of twelve he began studying at the École Municipale des Beaux-Arts. Friesz’s teacher was the same Charles Lhuillier who instilled in him the habit of studying the Old Masters, as Gustave Moreau had done for Matisse and his friends in Paris. In 1898 Friesz, just as Dufy would later, received a grant from the municipality of Le Havre to study at the École des Beaux-Arts in Paris and he entered the studio of Leon Bonnat. He settled on Montmartre, opposite the Bateau Lavoir, naturally becoming part of the Montmartre society of poets and artists. In the early years of the twentieth century Friesz began exhibiting in Le Havre. In 1901, together with Dufy and Rouault, he presented his work at the International Exhibition in Venice. From 1903 onwards, Friesz exhibited with his friends at the Salon des lndépendants, and from 1904 at the Salon d’Automne.

Othon Friesz. Photograph.

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Othon Friesz, Travaux d’Automne (Autumn Works), 1907. Oil on canvas, 54 x 65 cm. State Hermitage Museum, Saint Petersburg.

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Othon Friesz, Hill, 1908. Oil on canvas, 61 x 74 cm. State Hermitage Museum, Saint Petersburg.

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Othon Friesz, Still Life with a Statuette of Buddha, 1909. Oil on canvas, 51 x 42 cm. State Hermitage Museum, Saint Petersburg. Othon Friesz, Roofs and the Cathedral at Rouen, 1908. Oil on canvas, 119 x 95.5 cm. State Hermitage Museum, Saint Petersburg. (p. 130) Othon Friesz, Snow in Munich, 1909. Oil on canvas, 64 x 80 cm. Pushkin State Museum of Fine Arts, Moscow. (p. 131)

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As early as 1904 Friesz had his first one-man exhibition when the Galerie des Collectionneurs presented forty of his works to the public. In 1905 Berthe Weill began exhibiting Friesz, followed in 1907 by Druet, who bought many paintings from the artist, becoming his dealer, and featured him in personal and group exhibitions. It was from Druet that the majority of the pictures now in the Russian collections were purchased. Friesz was presented together with other Fauves at the Golden Fleece Salon in Moscow and at the exhibition held in Prague in 1910. Friesz’s life and artistic career developed along roughly the same lines as those of his friends. He, too, went through periods of contemplating the legacy of Cézanne and the Cubism of Picasso. For him, however, the period of formal searching was a short one — he found that balance between design and colour which did not permit him to change what had been chosen from the very outset of his career. It is difficult to agree with Dorival’s opinion that in the years 1908-1911 Friesz experienced a definite crisis; it was rather a logical further step in his development, one in which his powerful, life-affirming painting was enriched by new plastic discoveries.53 Friesz liked to travel, often together with one or other of his friends, around Germany and Italy. A trip to Portugal in 1911 made a tremendous impression on him. At the outbreak of the war he was mobilized. In 1915, Friesz painted a portrait of Andrée Rey, who was soon to become his wife. After the war Friesz took a studio on the Rue NotreDame-des-Champs in Paris where he worked for the rest of his life. In the 1920s and 1930s he painted a great deal in Provence, his native Normandy, and in the Jura mountains. He lived for a long time in Toulon and travelled to Italy, Belgium, and America. From 1925 onwards, French museums began to purchase Friesz’s paintings and in 1933 he was awarded the Legion d’Honneur. Like Dufy, Friesz tried his hand in the applied arts — his carpet entitled La Paix was exhibited in 1935, and in 1937 he created one of the wall-paintings for the World Fair in the Palais de Chaillot. But for Friesz painting would always remain in first place. After the Second World War he was offered a chair at the École des Beaux-Arts, but he turned it down. Othon Friesz died in his Paris studio on 10 January 1949. Researchers call the years 1900-1904 the Impressionist period in Friesz’s œuvre.54 Fritz Vanderpyl even expressed the opinion that if Friesz’s Fauvist friends had not entered his life, he would have followed the path taken by Eugène Boudin.55 The Russian collections do not provide a basis for judging the validity of these statements nor even enable us to see Friesz’s painting as it was at the time of the Fauves’ first presentations. But a sketch for the painting Travaux d’Automne (p. 126) demonstrates the artist’s maturity. Friesz worked on this painting in Matisse’s studio on the Rue Sevres. It was bought for Norway and hangs in the National Gallery in Oslo. The sketch has a special attraction arising from a greater abstraction of colour and shape than is seen in the final variant and the expressiveness of the texture. Two directions taken by the artist in his search are reflected here. First of all, there is light born of contrasts of colour — warm and cold, which in this work are still fairly resonant. A yellow, only rarely attaining the warmth of the red, stands alongside a green and a blue, which are not so much means of denoting trees or shadows as naturally arising, purely painterly requirements. At the same time the large, freely placed patches of colour model in a sculptural fashion the shape not only of a human figure or the crown of a tree, but of the very space in which every element becomes an inseparable part of the composition. “For me composition represents the clearest means of expressing what one has on one’s mind,” the artist said.56

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The course of development of Friesz’s ideas on composition can be seen in his landscapes from the following years — Hill (p. 127) with its sensuous plasticity of forms, where not only the hill itself, but the trees, houses and sky too form part of the spatial unity of the world. His Trees in Cassis (1909, Pushkin Museum of Fine Arts) is, at first sight, a more fragmented work, but in fact, it gives a no less full presentation of Friesz’s idea about the integrity of the natural world. Subordinated to the artist’s experiments with design in this period, the colour loses some of its power, but retains its purity and the delicacy of relations. Friesz took a step towards a sort of architectural constructiveness in composition. In the landscape Roofs and the Cathedral at Rouen (p. 130), even the clouds obey the geometric system which the shapes of the city suggest to the artist. But Friesz was too emotional, he could not contain himself within the limits of a single form; his temperament came close to that of the stormy Vlaminck, although their means of expressing it were different. Snow in Munich (p. 131), which at first seems confused and sketch-like, is an enchanting outward expression of Friesz’s joie de vivre. The very motif of snow falling unevenly on the city, the alternating warm golden and whitish patches evoke a feeling of joyful excitement and enhance the inner tension of the composition. The view of the city from above with the houses snuggling up to one another, the people crowding merrily in the squares and the trees brings to mind old Flemish compositions or the naive purity found in the landscapes of Raoul Dufy, who, incidentally, accompanied Friesz on his trip to Munich in 1909. Perhaps Dufy’s influence had something to do with Friesz’s brushwork becoming so light-hearted, free and curling. Yet at the same time he preserved the refinement of painterly relations, which may remain unnoticed in the impetuous rhythm of the painting: the pure green patch glittering through the snow in the very centre of the canvas, from which, as if in concentric circles, waves of shadows run out across the snow and pinky-gold patches on the earth, houses and sky. This work by Friesz revealed the natural Baroque nature of his art which found support in the lessons taught by his beloved Rubens. Temptation (Adam and Eve) (p. 135) might be termed a real Baroque composition. A pyramid constructed of human figures in the centre of the canvas is framed above by concentric arcs of palm leaves. The powerfully shaped figures are presented in exaggerated tense motion. Patches of red, pink, and gold in the midst of an exotic world modelled in blue and green comprise the colour core of this composition. His still lifes show the development of his imagination in colour and design. The figurine of the Buddha, compact and rounded, provides the key to a work (Still Life with a Statuette of the Buddha, p. 129) executed with a rare sculptural unity. Tulips and Daisies (1910, Hermitage) pays tribute to the harsh moulding of shapes seen in Cézanne’s flowers; here, though, the artist is more interested in the play of colour: from a bouquet in fairly subdued tones he scatters soft sparks in the form of petals on the outspread surface of the table. All the paintings by Friesz in the Russian collections date from a period which is sometimes alleged to have been a time of crisis in his work. But this group makes it possible to doubt such a harsh assessment. Taken as a whole, the canvases do not, perhaps, display any coherent tendency: Friesz tried out Cézanne’s plastic ideas and even Cubism here and there, simultaneously experimenting with colour; he painted landscapes and still lifes and also worked on complex many-figure compositions. But the artist was as full of energy as before and his individuality as a painter remained no less strong and evident.

Othon Friesz, Flowers, 1910. Oil on canvas, 65 x 81. State Hermitage Museum, Saint Petersburg. Othon Friesz, Trees in Cassis, 1909. Oil on canvas, 81 x 101 cm. Pushkin State Museum of Fine Arts, Moscow. (p. 134) Othon Friesz, Temptation (Adam and Eve), c. 1910. Oil on canvas, 73 x 60 cm. State Hermitage Museum, Saint Petersburg. (p. 135)

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HENRI MANGUIN 1874-1949

“H

e is a fauve, a wild beast, but a generous beast. He was a Fauve in his art, and everyone knows what that celebrated word means. A living harmony of body and soul, Manguin formed a single whole with his art. His paintings are real symphonies of clear and resonant colours. They are dominated by red, orangey red, purple, violet, as well as deep dark greens and golden yellows. The intensity of both line and form is exceptional. Everything is striking: ardent painting, which warms and delights everything here, is youth and joie de vivre, and still more, pride in life.” This impassioned characterization was given nearly twenty years after the artist’s death by Charles Terrasse.57 Henri Manguin’s life was a calm and steady one. He was born in Paris on 23 March 1874. From the age of six, when his father died, Manguin was brought up by his mother alone. At sixteen he decided to leave secondary school to devote himself entirely to painting. His success in this venture was due, not only to his mother’s wholehearted support, but, also, to the inheritance which his father had left him. That money allowed Manguin to concentrate fully on his art without the distraction of financial concerns. In 1894 Manguin entered Professor Gustave Moreau’s class in the École des Beaux-Arts; a step of great importance, for it largely determined his further creative course. While attending Moreau’s classes, Manguin made about twenty copies of works by Old Masters including paintings by Titian, Poussin, and Velazquez. This was all part of Moreau’s method of teaching which made the pupil actively think about the painting methods of the Old Masters and discover in the process of copying qualities close to his own artistic, personality. Moreau’s classes were in addition the focus for incessant discussions about art. In 1896 another, no less significant, event took place in Manguin’s life: he met the young Parisienne Jeanne Carette during a sketching tour in Brittany. They fell in love and married in 1899. In Jeanne, Manguin found a faithful friend who bore him three children and who became a permanent subject for his work. Manguin described his life with Jeanne as “so fulfilled and so wonderful.”58 The Manguins settled in the Rue Boursault aux Batignolles where Manguin was able to have his own studio in the garden. Marquet, Matisse, and Puy often came by to work together with Manguin. Pierre Cabanne wonderfully summed up the artist’s natural, innate hospitality: “For him, as for Matisse, Marquet, Dufy, and Valtat, Fauvism was primarily and ultimately friendship.”59 At the turn of the century Manguin’s name began to appear at major art exhibitions — in 1900 his works were accepted for show in the Salon of the Société National des Beaux Arts; Berthe Weill displayed his works in her own gallery; and in 1902 his paintings were shown at the Salon des Indépendants for the first time. In 1903, together with Matisse, Marquet, and Rouault, Manguin displayed his work at the Salon d’Automne, the place where they would soon achieve fame. The year 1905 was especially important as it saw the birth of Fauvism, but it was not only for this reason that it remained a landmark in Manguin’s life. During the summer, while travelling for the first time around the Mediterranean coast, he made a discovery of great significance for his painting — visiting Saint-Tropez and Paul Signac in the company of Matisse and Marquet, Manguin discovered that the bright southern light and southern

Henri Manguin. Photograph.

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Henri Manguin, Walk at St Tropez, 1905. Oil on canvas, 73 x 91.5 cm. State Hermitage Museum, Saint Petersburg.

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Henri Manguin, Landscape at St Tropez, 1905. Oil on canvas, 50.5 x 60.5 cm. State Hermitage Museum, Saint Petersburg.

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Henri Manguin, Flowers, 1915. Oil on canvas, 41.7 x 33.5 cm. State Hermitage Museum, Saint Petersburg. Henri Manguin, Morning at Cavaliere, 1906. Oil on canvas, 81.5 x 65 cm. State Hermitage Museum, Saint Petersburg. (p. 142) Henri Manguin, Woman Bather, 1906. Oil on canvas, 61 x 49 cm. Pushkin State Museum of Fine Arts, Moscow. (p. 143)

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scenery were just what he needed for his painting. From this time onwards Manguin and his family usually spent their summers in the Villa Demière which stood right by the Mediterranean, with Jeanne posing for him in the bright sun. His palette, formerly rather dark, became much lighter. More pure reds, greens and yellows began to appear in his work. These evident signs of change now united him with Matisse, who was the group’s leading figure at the exhibition in the Salon d’Automne. Unconstrained and active by nature, Manguin always liked to travel, but from 1905 onwards his restless feet rarely took him away from the Cote d’Azur where it would seem he left no corner unpainted. During the First World War, Manguin and his family settled first in Lausanne, and then near Lake Neuchâtel. The Swiss scenery, with its distinctive picturesque motifs, range of colours and light conditions became as integral a part of Manguin’s work as his views of Provence. In 1949, after Henri and Jeanne Manguin celebrated their golden wedding anniversary with the family, they went to the Villa L’Oustalet. There, on 25 September, Henri Manguin passed away. The figures of Jeanne and the children portrayed in the foreground function as empty space filler, just as Biblical characters do in the landscapes of the Old Masters. The green masses of trees in the background are arranged like theatrical side scenes. The aerial perspective created by the warm tones of the path passing into the cold distance proves just as effective a device in the twentieth century as in the past. However, the precise old system is unceremoniously broken by nature which intervenes into the painting. The light is quite blinding. The path is depicted as a light yellow strip that cuts across the canvas and is sharply contrasted by the saturated blue of the sea, despite the fact that the two areas of colour are divided by a third, green one. Manguin had clearly not yet worked out a style of his own because the prevailing influence of Cézanne can be felt in the picture. In 1906, Sergei Shchukin bought Morning at Cavaliere (p. 142), while Ivan Morozov purchased Woman Bather (p. 143). Both pictures are examples of the temperamental and intuitive manner which Manguin developed after he had found his own artistic direction. In the first of these works, the colours attain complete purity, with red adjacent to dark blue, green alongside yellow, each acquiring a vibrant strength. It seems that it is precisely the patch of red in the bottom corner of the landscape that is reflected onto the tree trunks creating that shade of violet which only Manguin knew how to obtain. The general perception of colour and light is similar in Woman Bather. Green, pink, red, and lilac patches, often quite large in size, settle on the naked flesh, the surface of the sea and the hill just. The general effect of the manner which Manguin discovered for himself is a sense of light permeating everything around. Yet Manguin’s interpretation of nature is never marked by the loud orchestral resonance found in Vlaminck’s work or the well thought-out decorative quality of Matisse’s painting. Everything in his work, though thoroughly premeditated, seems to emerge gently and spontaneously, without any strenuous effort. When he was dying, Manguin repeated over and over again the words: “Harmonize, harmonize...”60 By 1915 Manguin had had many encounters with Swiss art and it may have influenced his painting here. To a larger extent, however, these are completely natural changes, a product of the rethinking and changes of mood he went through like all of his friends. Cabanne wrote in his biographical work that in the early 1940s when Manguin was nearing his seventieth birthday, he again set his work alight with “wild” colour just as he had done in his Fauvist youth. But colour had never vanished from Manguin’s painting. Colour was the unifying spirit which all the Fauves shared and the medium through which they expressed their joie de vivre and spontaneity.

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KEES VAN DONGEN 1877-1968

“T

he Fauvist bomb was a fabrication made up by the litterateurs, and it only became a bomb after fifty years of recollections. At the time it was at most a petard.”61 Van Dongen’s irony was part of his artistic means and at the same time a means of self-defence. In his attempt to divide Van Dongen’s work up into periods, his main biographer, Louis Chaumeil, distinguishes a “period of Fauvism” and, extending through all the following years, a “worldly period,” the name of which is not connected to any particular stylistic peculiarity for the very reason that Van Dongen’s art belonged entirely to Fauvism. Kees (Cornelis Theodore Maria) van Dongen was born into the family of a Dutch brewer living in Delfshaven, a suburb of Rotterdam, on 26 January 1877. In Holland he obtained a professional training, studying for four years at the Royal Academy of Fine Arts in Rotterdam. In 1897 he used money his father gave him to take a tourist trip to Paris for the Bastille Day holiday. “Paris drew me like a beacon,” he confessed later.62 After that, came a period spent back in Holland. It wasn’t until 1899 that Van Dongen settled in Paris with his wife, the artist, Augusta Preitinger. “I set off for Paris a second time about 1900,” he recalled. “Of course, I was broke, moved around and did all sorts of little jobs. I installed myself in a square and painted the portraits of people who wanted it... Along with other artists from Montmartre — Picasso, for example — I tried to sell something in the area around the Médrano Circus. We spread our paintings out on the ground. They sold for a hundred sous each.” 63 At this time in Montmartre he made the acquaintance of other anarchists as young and bold as himself — the future Fauves. As 1905 was essential to all of the Fauves, it was a landmark in Van Dongen’s life, as well. Van Dongen submitted only two paintings for the famous Salon d’Automne because a personal exhibition of his work had been arranged for the same time at the Galerie Druet. It was this latter display which prompted Vauxcelles rapturous assessment: “This landscapist is drunk on sun and reflexes. He paints at noon at the height of August, which gives rise to his torrential orgies of light, heat, and colour.”64 The art business was fairly profitable, making it now possible for Van Dongen to travel. Spain and Morocco drew him with their aspect of the exotic which he was always inclined to seek out, even in the Circus Médrano in Montmartre. Something new appeared in his manner of painting — refined, elongated lines, a tendency towards the grotesque. In 1921 he and Augusta divorced, which confused and shocked contemporaries; only his Fauvist friends understood him. Probably, Van Dongen’s secret lay but in the fact that essentially he himself never changed. There was a glaring contradiction between his worldly success and the way he created his portraits in a manner sometimes bordering on the grotesque which he retained to the end of his days. Van Dongen worked selflessly to the end of his long life, and even at the age of eighty or ninety he amused himself in youthful ways: he was very fond of the cinema and was a member of the jury at the Cannes Film Festivals. The collection of Fauvist works in Moscow and St Petersburg does not allow us to see Van Dongen’s late works, but his pieces from the period 1907-1911 laid the

Kees Van Dongen. Photograph. Kees Van Dongen, Lady in Black Gloves, 1907-1908. Oil on canvas, 73 x 91 cm. Pushkin State Museum of Fine Arts, Moscow. (p. 146) Kees van Dongen, The Red Dancer, 1907. Oil on canvas, 99.7 x 81 cm. State Hermitage Museum, Saint Petersburg. (p. 147)

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Kees van Dongen, Woman in a Black Hat, 1908. Oil on canvas, 100 x 81.5 cm. State Hermitage Museum, Saint Petersburg. Kees Van Dongen, Spanish Woman, 1910-1911. Oil on canvas, 46 x 39 cm. Pushkin State Museum of Fine Arts, Moscow. (p. 150) Kees Van Dongen, Antonia La Coquinera, 1906. Oil on canvas, 100 x 81 cm. State Hermitage Museum, Saint Petersburg. (p. 151)

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foundation for what was to come later in his painting. In 1907-1908 Van Dongen often depicted cabaret dancers as well as the performers and acrobats of the Médrano Circus. In its way, a banner not only for the young Van Dongen’s painting, but for Fauvism as well, is his Red Dancer (p. 147) bought in 1909 by the publisher Nikolai Riabushinsky at the Golden Fleece Salon in Moscow. A sea of orangey-red flame floods half the canvas, which is sharply divided along one diagonal. Laid broadly and coarsely on this ochrous foundation are dabs of colour in varying shapes and sizes tracing the motion of the whirling skirt. One small feature — a tiny particle of pure green on the white garter — is testimony to Van Dongen’s far from indifferent attitude to the science of colour. Yet this is merely a subtle painterly nuance just like the green shadow on the face. The blazing red has no need of support, it is born in the freedom of the painterly texture and of the intensity of pure colour applied straight from the tube. Colour decides everything here; it determines the design, motion and space. The wavy contours of the skirt contrast with the abstracted, simplified outlines of the face, neck and shoulder. Lady in a Black Hat (p. 150) was a continuation, as it were, of Van Dongen’s reflections on beauty — this is one more aspect of it, that splendid image which, in Van Dongen’s words, is not a photograph of life but belongs to the realm of the daydream. The wide-brimmed hat and green raincoat give the model a timeless character, taking us away from the sphere of observed life. The slightly vibrant background is radiant, the contours softened. The mass of green, just like the large black patch of the hat, are present on the canvas so as to cause the warm pink tones of the face with its huge dark eyes to light up tenderly. It is hard to consider the Spanish Woman (1910-1911, Pushkin Museum of Fine Arts) a portrait, although the features are distinctive and clearly drawn from life. On a grey background, unusually flat for Van Dongen, an orange-golden face shines out, modelled in colour in a barely detectable way. A geometrical ornament appears on the grey dress — a hint of the future arabesque. The soft fading out of colour that was seen in the works of the previous years is replaced by a black contour. A free motion of the brush, it is a stylized decorative element completing Van Dongen’s transition to an idiom of flat patches of colour on the surface of the canvas. The appearance of such paintings was a result of the impressions Van Dongen gained on his first visit to Spain. At the same time as those canvases of 1906-1908 which were full of motion and spatially elaborate, he was also painting works like Spring (1907-1908, Hermitage). Spring is reminiscent of the depiction of fruit trees in the work of the Dutch artist Piet Mondrian for whom they became the foundation for a gradual geometrization of design and simplification of colour. The exquisite lines of the branches fan out, becoming the graphic skeleton of the painting. Strung on these are several horizontal arched rows of patches of colour: greens, pinks, whites, and light blues. Van Dongen precisely sensed the spirit of the age as is demonstrated both by his association with the other Fauves and by the appearance of such works as Spring. Van Dongen’s life was full, productive, and varied. In 1929 he took French citizenship, thus reinforcing his position as “the Parisian Dutchman.” Soon after, in 1931 he organized the exhibition Trente Années de I’Art in his own studio. From the 1930s his paintings were exhibited in America, Belgium, Holland, Britain, and Switzerland. In 1967 a major retrospective exhibition was held first in Paris and then in Rotterdam to mark the artist’s ninetieth birthday. Van Dongen died in Monte Carlo on 27 May 1968. An enormous number of his painted works have found their way to countries and museums around the world.

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GEORGES ROUAULT 1871-1958

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ndre Salmon, the poet and chronicler of Montmartre life, in striving to attribute a unique role to each of the figures of the artistic avant-garde dubbed Georges Rouault “un Fauve d’Apocalypse.”65 Bernard Dorival, the most penetrating among the scholars of Fauvism, defines Rouault’s relationship to the movement with the precision of a formula — “Fauve indépendant, mais Fauve authentique.”66 There cannot be the slightest doubt about the genuineness of Rouault’s Fauvism — he was one of Gustave Moreau’s pupils and active alongside Matisse not only at the beginning of their appearances as a group, but also at the foundation of the Salon d’Automne itself. No less energetically than Vlaminck, Rouault asserted his right to that very freedom and subjectivity in art which was one of the most important characteristics of Fauvism. It is possible to assert that Rouault was just as indispensable a member of the Fauve community as Maurice de Vlaminck or Kees van Dongen was. His talent with its unique quality acted as a counterweight to the other Fauves’ obsession with colour which sets him quite distinctly apart within the Fauvist circle and evokes doubts about the genuineness of his kind of Fauvism — which led to Dorival coining his formula. Doubts of this kind can probably only be justified by a narrow conception of Fauvism, as covering a period of no more than a few years and defined exclusively by the primacy of colour. Georges Rouault was born on 27 May 1871 at the height of the battles over the Paris Commune in a cellar where his family had taken refuge from the shooting. His mother’s father was a passionate admirer of Honoré Daumier and Édouard Manet. The story has come down that his grandfather, expecting to find only sorrow in the destroyed house and learning instead of the child’s arrival, declared: “Perhaps he will be an artist.” Rouault began his artistic career in the crafts when his father apprenticed him to the stained-glass maker Albert Besnard. He achieved such progress in this field that the artist suggested he produce some stained-glass panels to his designs. Yet Rouault longed for the fine arts. At the same time as he was working with stained-glass he attended evening courses at the École des Arts Décoratifs and in 1890 he entered the École des Beaux-Arts to study under Professor Elie Delaunay. After Delaunay died in 1892, his place was taken by Gustave Moreau and Rouault became his favourite pupil. Moreover, Rouault turned out to be the only one of Moreau’s protégés whom the teacher influenced directly and that is worthy of particular examination. In any case, when left in charge of Moreau’s legacy after his death, Rouault would inevitably have come up against a staggering fact: the professor, loyal to the academic school, had felt an irrepressible urge to immerse himself in the element of painting and in private had created works in which there was neither subject-matter nor motif at all, which were in point of fact the first examples of abstract painting. Rouault’s work with stained-glass in his youth had given him a feeling for the concrete, material nature of painting as such. His embarkation upon the independent course of the artistic avantgarde was entirely natural. In 1903 he was among the founders of the Salon d’Automne, in 1905 he was with his friends under the banner of “Matisse’s group” at the Salon des

Georges Rouault. Photograph.

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Georges Rouault, Spring, 1911. Pastel and watercolour on paper, 72 x 57.4 cm. State Hermitage Museum, Saint Petersburg. Georges Rouault, Bathing in a Lake, 1907. Pastel and watercolour on paper, 65 x 96 cm. Pushkin State Museum of Fine Arts, Moscow. (p. 156) Georges Rouault, Les Filles (The Girls), 1907. Pastel and tempera on paper, 97 x 65 cm. State Hermitage Museum, Saint Petersburg. (p. 157)

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Indépendants and, finally, at the celebrated 1905 Salon d’Automne he was one of those christened “Fauves.” Outwardly Rouault’s life was just as ordinary. It was spent for the most part in Paris. In 1908 he married and his wife, Marthe, gave him four children. In 1910 the Galerie Druet organized Rouault’s first personal exhibition — 183 works, comprising paintings, drawings, and ceramics. Later the artist fulfilled many commissions for Vollard. From the beginning of the 1930s Rouault exhibitions were arranged all over the globe, including America. The artist’s eightieth birthday was marked by huge retrospectives in Paris, Brussels, Amsterdam, New York, Tokyo, and Milan. Rouault’s painting rarely went beyond the usual Fauvist genres — landscape and still life, and was restricted to a range of themes already established in his youth — clowns, prostitutes, court officials, and the Passion of Christ. Yet the continual repetition of the same set of subjects in his painting over a period of seventy years has not rendered it monotonous; on the contrary, it demands a special kind of concentration far removed from the shock or simple quick reaction most often evoked by the works of his friends. Rouault’s girls in their numerous variants appeared at the very beginning of the century and became a sort of sign of his shift from the world of Moreau to that of the Parisian, more precisely, Montmartre avant-garde. When Rouault stated that Providence itself had sent him this theme by opening in front of his window in Versailles the doors of a brothel glittering with colour and light, he was undoubtedly kidding the listener. Between 1903 and 1914 Rouault produced variations on the theme, each new drawing or painting revealed some new nuance in this seemingly unchanging world. In Les Filles (p. 157), he is rather turning things over in his mind, making the viewer a fellow-witness of the figures frozen before him which possess both an expressive ugliness and, at the same time, an attractive openness. The image was born of an integral approach indivisibly combining colour and form: the abstracted line of the somewhat coarse contour drawn with the brush, the volume created by a contrast of colour. The pale blue and pink do not denote an object, nor light and shade, but lie on the sheet of paper in softly alternating patches unifying the space. Bathing in a Lake (p. 156) was produced in the same period and in the same key as regards colour and form. Yet this work, now in Moscow, is evidence that as early as 1907 there were two Rouaults: alongside the sad philosopher there existed an artist granted the capacity to interpret the joy of life purely in the manner of the ancient world. With Spring (1911, Hermitage) the rose window of a Gothic cathedral simply leaps into the mind. Lines diverge from the centre, broad, soft contours dividing the circle into separate parts. Warm colours — a dull red and gold — are present only in a few sparse outcrops; the petals of the rose are filled with a pale blue which glows like the glass in a leaded window. The beauty of Spring is founded entirely on rhythm and colour. In Rouault’s work, the boundary between graphic art and painting is not a clearly defined one — his graphic pieces, even the black and white ones, are always picturesque; his painted sheets — produced in a combination of tempera, gouache, watercolour and pastel — are often taken for graphic works. Rouault’s work goes beyond the generally accepted conceptions which hold Fauvism to have been limited to researching expressive form. For the Fauvist artists themselves, the brightness of Rouault’s creative individuality was the key feature which made him one of them and evoked their profound respect. “The things which Georges Rouault’s painting is capable of expressing, the essence of his emotion, the quality of his feelings, are something words cannot express,” was Maurice de Vlaminck’s conclusion.67

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JEAN PUY 1876-1960

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orival classified Jean Puy as “le demi-fauve,”68 the reason being the distinctive place which Puy always occupied among his friends. He exhibited together with them at the Salon des Indépendants and the Salon d’Automne, he became friends with Matisse, Marquet, Manguin, and Camoin, yet at the same time he stood somewhat apart, as if evaluating their emotional outbursts and their attempts to shock with a detached eye. Puy’s character had one specific feature: he always opposed any pressure whatsoever. In the words of his brother, the critic Michel Puy, he resisted his father’s desire to see him as a budding architect and then later the influence of the classical school of art. He equally, stubbornly, refused to succumb to the effect that Matisse’s will and Matisse’s art had on him. As a result, Puy’s painting, although linked to the art of the other Fauves by a heightened sense of colour and a search for terse means of expression, bore within it a steady striving after the classical finished quality in a work and a constant sense of strict measure in the arrangement of colours and the texture of the paints. Yet, can it be claimed that this stubborn independence itself led him away from Fauvism? A resistance to theories and groupings, an acceptance only of the authority of the artist’s intuition and a loyalty to the ideals of his youth — is this set of characteristics not testimony to positions coinciding with the convictions of the leading Fauves? Puy, like the rest of the Fauves, like Maurice de Vlaminck or Charles Camoin, proclaimed the individuality of his own course. Puy possessed one further important quality which illuminated all his painting — a life-affirming optimism, that joie de vivre which with him, as with the other Fauves, manifested itself in the totality of his artistic idiom. Echoing Vlaminck, Van Dongen, and Camoin, Puy declared: Above all I love life, I feel tenderness in seeing it pulsating alongside me: living things and objects moving in the light; the bursts of sunshine on women’s hair and their smiles. It is intoxicating and my personal difficulties come precisely from that: the interaction of tones are not enough for me, I would like to say everything. I would like to put life itself into my picture, which is certainly impossible.69

Jean Puy was born on 8 November 1876 into the family of the owner of a workshop producing tiles. He was a brilliant pupil at his secondary school for humanities and his father wanted him to enter a profession which seemed close to his own business — that of architect. Before beginning the preparatory courses for the École des Beaux-Arts in Lyons Puy had never taken an interest in painting and he knew almost nothing about it. He soon understood that this was a major omission and he began to study at the École des Beaux-Arts in the studio of Tony Toilet, a portrait painter and pupil of Alexandre Cabanel. Later Puy would say that Toilet had in fact been his only teacher. The free atmosphere of that studio with its lively discussions about art coupled with his own unexpectedly rapid progress prompted Puy to abandon thoughts of architecture and to make painting his speciality.

Jean Puy. Sketch.

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Jean Puy, Summer, 1906. Oil on canvas, 76.6 x 112.5 cm. State Hermitage Museum, Saint Petersburg.

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Jean Puy, Landscape, c. 1903. Oil on canvas, 48.5 x 73.5 cm. State Hermitage Museum, Saint Petersburg.

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Jean Puy, The Roman Bridge in Saint-Maurice. Oil on canvas, 73 x 92 cm. Pushkin State Museum of Fine Arts, Moscow. Jean Puy, In the Studio, 1912. Oil on canvas, 80 x 98 cm. Pushkin State Museum of Fine Arts, Moscow. (p. 164) Jean Puy, Portrait of the Artist’s Wife, 1909. Oil on canvas, 131.5 x 97 cm. State Hermitage Museum, Saint Petersburg. (p. 165)

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In 1898 Puy turned up in Paris with some very provincial ideas: the historical painting of the Salon seemed to him the ultimate dream and he enrolled himself in the Académie Julien where Jean Joseph Benjamin-Constant and his idol Jean Paul Laurens taught. He very quickly became disenchanted: the contrast with the atmosphere of Toilet’s studio in Lyons and the gloominess of academic painting alongside the bright palette of the Impressionists caused him to leave the Académie Julien. A summer spent in Brittany — where the spirit of Gauguin wandered and nature itself caused the landscape-painter to select the course opened up by the Impressionists — strengthened Puy’s leaning towards the new art. As a result, in 1899 he became one of Eugène Carrière’s pupils at the academy which Carrière had just founded and fell into Matisse’s sphere of influence. “Matisse, who was older than us, taught me a lot with his remarks and criticisms regarding our studies,” Puy recalled. “More than that, his instruction on the rudiments of design were based on the same principles as with Toilet, but concentrated far more on the relationships of half-tones and colours.”70 In 1901 Puy exhibited for the first time at the Salon des Indépendants; from 1904 to 1908 he regularly exhibited at the Salon d’Automne where in 1905 he appeared among the Fauves. A reproduction of his painting Repos sous les Pins was included among the “nastiest” pieces from the Salon d’Automne featured in the pages of L’lllustration. Puy’s success was directly bound up with their collective emergence. After the 1905 Salon d’Automne, Ambroise Vollard drew up a contract under the terms of which he bought almost everything the artist produced each year. This explains why Puy did not exhibit his work much until the contract expired in 1921. Until the start of the First World War Puy spent each summer on the Brittany coast, dividing the rest of the year between his Paris studio and Roanne. In his youth he had dreamt of becoming a sailor and to some extent he now realized his wish through his love of yachting and his seascapes. From the outbreak of the Second World War the artist lived in his native Roanne and the Parisian public gradually forgot about him. Jean Puy died on 6 March 1960. The painting Summer (p. 160) dates from Fauvism’s most “outspoken” period, nevertheless it contains neither a burning red nor contrasts of complementary colours, nor any large measure of abstraction. There is light, reverberating in a manner more reminiscent of the Impressionists, penetrating through dense foliage, glistening off the clearing in the background, slipping in patches along the shadowy path. The intensity of the light fluctuates, finding reflection in nuances of yellow, orange, red, and warm green. In the middle of the canvas there is a concentration of cold green hues which explode in a circle of light at the centre. And against the background of this yellow circle, like in the lens of a camera, a couple appears. In the glimpsed patches of light and shade the eye discerns the human figures like ghosts populating Puy’s canvas, strolling along the path, resting on the grass, wandering across the clearings. This landscape evokes associations with the symbolist spirit of art in Gauguin’s Brittany rather than the painting of the Fauves. Closest of all to the Fauvist works by virtue of its colour scheme is Landscape (p. 161) which is constructed on a sharp contrast of complementary colours: in the centre, a red band is woven into the pure green surface of the canvas. Yet here, too, the stubborn Puy cannot avoid raising an objection to Matisse — the mass of greenery in the foreground possesses a material corporality, the white house crowned with a red roof stands out like a cube, while the hill rises up in folds attaining a Cézannesque plasticity. It was precisely in Cézanne’s plastic forms — transmitted to him, as Puy himself acknowledged, by Matisse — that the artist found an alternative to the flat patches of colour in Matisse’s own painting.

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LOUIS VALTAT 1869-1952

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esearchers have assessed Louis Valtat’s relationship to Fauvism in different ways: Huyghe did not include him among this circle of artists at all; Dorival mentions Valtat among those close to Fauvism; Chassé not only devoted a special article to Valtat as a Fauve, but considers him one of those in whose work Fauvism matured earlier than others; Cachin asserts not only that Valtat was a Fauve, but that he always remained one.71 There are grounds for such contradictory judgements. Valtat was older than the majority of the exponents of Fauvism; in the 1890s he was already a mature artist and kept company more with the preceding generation of painters — Pierre Bonnard, Maurice Denis, Felix Vallotton, Edouard Vuillard, and others of the Nabis group. He was, it is true, the same age as the “old man” of Fauvism — Matisse, but it is hard to say how early they established artistic contacts. Valtat’s biographers assert that he and Matisse had a common teacher in Gustave Moreau, but their years of study do not coincide. The first years of the twentieth century saw the beginning of his friendship with Auguste Renoir and Paul Signac during a visit to Saint-Tropez. Valtat was already exhibiting at the Salon des Indépendants when the works of the future “wild beasts” began to appear there in an ever more noticeable mass. At the 1905 Salon des Indépendants his painting disturbed François Monod, who felt no doubt in associating Valtat’s art with the Fauvist camp which had already appeared; in the critic’s words, Valtat “combines his glaring hues in boiling misshapes.”72 The final verdict was given in the celebrated 4 November 1905 issue of the journal L’lllustration — among the most scandalous exhibits at the Salon d’Automne, alongside Matisse, Derain, Rouault, Puy, and Manguin, there in the centre of the page we find a reproduction of Valtat’s Marine. Louis Valtat was born in Dieppe on 8 August 1869 into the family of a ship-owner. When he was eleven years old, he moved with his parents to Versailles and attended the secondary school there. Between 1887 and 1891 Valtat studied at the École des BeauxArts in Paris and also at the Académie Julien under Jules Dupré. In 1899 he began exhibiting at the Salon des Indépendants. Throughout the 1890s Valtat travelled around England and Normandy, the south of France and Spain. He painted, participated together with Toulouse-Lautrec in work for the production of Le Chariot de Terre Cuite at the Théâtre l’Oeuvre, and drew for magazines. In 1899 he built a villa near Anthéor where he did much of his work right up until 1914. 1900 was a year of important events in Valtat’s life: he married Suzanne Noel and signed a contract with Ambroise Vollard (which lasted until 1912) long before any of the other Fauves. Vollard said prophetically: “Have patience. One day Valtat will be perceived as a great painter.”73 Valtat’s father saw to it that he was materially well provided for. His life proceeded on a fairly even keel and one can imagine the impact of the scandal caused by the 1905

Louis Valtat. Photograph.

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Louis Valtat, Hut in the Wood, c. 1906. Oil on canvas, 66 x 83 cm. Pushkin State Museum of Fine Arts, Moscow.

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Louis Valtat, Boat, 1899. Oil on canvas, 81 x 101 cm. State Hermitage Museum, Saint Petersburg.

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Louis Valtat, Violet Rocks (Sea Tide), 1900. Oil on canvas, 65.5 x 81.5 cm. State Hermitage Museum, Saint Petersburg.

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Salon d’Automne. Yet subsequently little changed, he worked sometimes on the Mediterranean coast, sometimes in Normandy or Brittany. In 1914 he installed himself in a studio on the Avenue de Wagram in Paris; in 1924 he bought an estate in the Chevreuse valley where he worked for the rest of his life. Seen through an outsider’s eyes, Valtat’s life was not marked by any significant events; for the artist himself there was always one vital thing — painting. And when in 1948 glaucoma caused Valtat to lose his sight; for him, painting and life itself were over. Louis Valtat died in a Paris clinic on 2 January 1952. The earliest painting by Valtat in the Russian collections is Boat (p. 169), executed in a bright Impressionistic range of colours with a large variety of ceruse mixtures. It represents one of the earliest variants in the Fauvist circle of an interpretation on canvas of southern light. There is already here that broad sweep, that free, sinuous drawing with the brush which finds its continuation in distinctively shaped dabs of paint, laid on not in accordance with the form of an object, but rather contrary to it, retaining its own form. Valtat achieves real power of colour in Violet Rocks (Sea Tide) (1900, Hermitage). The sharp contrast of blue and reddish violet conveys the intensity of southern light which is then accentuated by the pure whites on the waves and clouds. The distinctive wavy drawing with the brush produces a vivid impression of the vacillation of the surface of the sea. Anthéor Bay (p. 172) continues that trend. Sometimes in the disturbed texture, in the repetitions of elongated yellow or green dabs of paint laid on in parallel (The Farm, p. 140) there is clear evidence of acknowledgement of Van Gogh’s painting which indeed produced an indelible impression on this generation of artists. Valtat really did remain loyal to the Fauvism which linked him to Matisse’s group in the eyes of contemporaries. Yet neither did he betray the other tendency of his youth. Girls Playing with a Lion Cub (p. 38) puts one in mind of the motifs of Pierre Puvis de Chauvannes, perceived through the intellectual symbolism of the Nabis artists and the plastic idiom of Cézanne. The tendency towards light-coloured painting constructed around a harmony of blues, pinks and pale greens is something Valtat retains even in the motifs of Mediterranean nature. At the same time as Sunlight under the Trees (p. 39) he painted In the South of France (p. 44) where the contrast of reds and greens gives way to soft transitions of yellows into a cold green and the subtlest treatment of a golden-pink light on the clouds. An astonishing work by Valtat — indeed an embodiment of the entire sum of his discoveries as a painter — is The Sea at Anthéor (1904-1907, Pushkin Museum of Fine Arts). This landscape dating from the period of the scandalous Salon d’Automne gives expression to the Fauves’ attempts to capture southern light. As in Marine, Valtat chooses a point of view against the light, when the sun penetrates everywhere, but the warm foreground seems dark in comparison with the blinding glare of the water. Pastose white comma-like dots cover the surface of the sea. The surface of the canvas with its large dabs of colour and the expressive drawing of the trees seems rough, according with the most banal conceptions of the nature of Fauvism. Yet at the same time the narrow strip of sky presents a miracle of the subtlest colour harmony where the eye cannot trace the transitions from delicate lilacs and pinks to pale greens. It is possible that Valtat’s closeness to Auguste Renoir in this period of his life in some way inspired him in his colourist searching, yet his art is devoid of direct influences, even from the most powerful of artists.

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Louis Valtat, Anthéor Bay, c. 1906-1907. Oil on canvas, 74 x 93 cm. State Hermitage Museum, Saint Petersburg.

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Louis Valtat, Young Women in the Garden, c. 1898. Oil on canvas, 65 x 80 cm. State Hermitage Museum, Saint Petersburg.

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HENRI LE FAUCONNIER 1881-1946

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enri Le Fauconnier is one of the most interesting figures among the artists connected with Fauvism. He was not a member of Matisse’s group and he did not exhibit together with them at the 1905 Salon d’Automne. When he entered the École des Beaux-Arts in Paris, none of the Fauves were there any longer and Le Fauconnier found himself in another circle of artists who already belonged effectively to the next generation in French art. Yet for him the encounter with Fauvism was to play a major role. His exceptional case enables us to see not only the strength of Fauvism’s effect on contemporaries, but also the international essence of its conception, the organic nature of the movement set off in France by Matisse’s group and its inherent link with what was happening in other countries. Henri Le Fauconnier was born into the family of a doctor at Hesdin in northern France on 12 December 1881. In 1900 he left for Paris to study law, but, in 1901, he entered the École des Beaux-Arts. He effectively followed the same path as all the Fauves: he copied the Old Masters in the Louvre and, dissatisfied with the academicism of Professor Jean-Paul Laurens, found his way to the Académie Julien. From 1904, Le Fauconnier exhibited regularly at the Salon des Indépendants which is where he first encountered the work of the future Fauves. The 1905 Salon d’Automne probably did bring about a certain upheaval in the formation of his style of painting; the influence of Matisse and the artists of the “Chatou school” — Derain and Vlaminck — becomes noticeable. In the summers of 1906 and 1907, Le Fauconnier worked in Ploumanach in northern Brittany. One senses in his landscapes an ever-growing tendency towards abstraction, towards the expression of bright light. At the 1907 Salon d’Automne, Le Fauconnier presented works which naturally belonged to the Fauvist trend. In 1908, 1909 and 1910, at the Golden Fleece exhibitions and Izdebsky’s Salon in Russia, his painting was inseparable from Fauvism. In 1908 Riabushinsky, the organizer of the Golden Fleece Salon, bought Le Fauconnier’s Little Schoolgirl (1907, Hermitage) in Moscow. In 1909, he made the first Cubist experiments in his painting. From 1910 he became one of the most striking characters in Montparnasse and started exhibiting together with the Cubists at the Salon d’Automne and Salon des Indépendants. In 1912, he became the director of the Académie de la Palette in Paris, where those who studied under him included Marc Chagall, Marcel Gromaire, Nadezhda Udaltsova, and Liubov Popova. Le Fauconnier joined the committee of the Salon des Indépendants in 1912 as the leading artist of the Cubist group and exhibited at the Jack of Diamonds show in Russia. In 1915, Le Fauconnier moved to Amsterdam and became the foremost representative of modern art there. His first personal exhibition opened in Germany. It was just at this point that his work underwent a major change: Cubism did not satisfy him and he turned to the Expressionist tendencies.

Henri Le Fauconnier. Sketch. Henri Le Fauconnier, The Signal, 1915. Oil on canvas, 80 x 99 cm. State Hermitage Museum, Saint Petersburg. (p. 176) Henri Le Fauconnier, Lake, 1911. Oil on canvas, 92 x 72.5 cm. State Hermitage Museum, Saint Petersburg. (p. 177)

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Henri Le Fauconnier, Village among the Rocks, c. 1910. Oil on canvas, 74 x 93 cm. State Hermitage Museum, Saint Petersburg.

178

The following years made him the most prominent figure on the Dutch art scene and in 1916 he participated in the formation of the Het Signaal group. Between 1918 and 1940 Le Fauconnier’s personal exhibitions travelled around all the main cities of Europe, but during that period, the artist himself, after all his earlier multifarious activities, no longer took an active part in the life of the world around him. The immediate cause of this was the death of his wife Marusya in 1918. In 1920 he returned to his Paris studio. He lived as a recluse at 10 Rue Halles where he died in January 1946. In the Golden Fleece Salon of 1908 Le Fauconnier’s Little Schoolgirl appeared to be one of the most typical works of Fauvism. The painting owes its expressivity of colour based on complementary tones not to the motif, which is almost painterly neutral and devoid of any tension, but to the pathos of the inner life. Liberation from the pressure of the academic system, the “wild” striving to paint in “pure red” and “pure blue” — here it is all perfectly natural. Le Fauconnier, like the young Vlaminck, is keenly sensitive to the plasticity of oil paint laid thickly in very large red, yellow, blue, green, and white dabs on the surface of the canvas. Yet, the figure of the girl and the vase are built up with that analytical attitude to the construction of form to which all the Fauves came sooner or later through the experience of Cézanne. It is hard to see anything unnatural in Le Fauconnier’s change of artistic direction: for many artists the creative quest brings with it no small number of such upheavals. Le Fauconnier also begins to be more abstract now and again, to fragment his image here and there, interpreting the shape of his beloved Breton hills in his Cubist landscapes (Village among the Rocks, c. 1910, and Lake in the Mountains, 1911, both now in the Hermitage). It might be suggested that the thin layer of paint, soft transitions of greens and ochreous yellows, the less pastose texture, and the contrasts of pure colour are more in accordance with his nature. Yet after the Little Schoolgirl that is hard to believe: his art had been too free and spontaneous three or four years before. Le Fauconnier did not imitate and did not succumb to the influence of others; he delighted in “singing his own song.” Cubism, in his interpretation, proved to be something like a building material. His departure from Cubism was neither tragic nor unexpected, but simply a logical continuation of what he had begun. It would be incorrect to regard Le Fauconnier’s encounter with the German Expressionists as a chance occurrence leading to mutual influences: it was a meeting of kindred artists for whom the expressivity of colour and freedom of creative means were a common language. The red in The Signal (p. 176) vies with the reds Vlaminck or Van Dongen produced in 1905-1907; it reverberates more strongly than the colour of August Macke or Kandinsky. The red colour dominates in the canvas; it lies not in dabs but in large, expressive patches; its dynamism is intensified by concentric sweeps of the brush as, too, is the impact of the whites and yellows. If it were not for the human figure, it would be possible to see The Signal as something approaching Kandinsky’s abstract painting, to which Le Fauconnier never came closer. His Dutch landscapes of 1915 reveal a no less intense temperament in the pastose painted surface, although none of those later works have a red so powerfully resonant. It is possible to compare The Signal directly with works by Le Fauconnier’s German friends, but far more well-founded associations are evoked by his own paintings from the time when he worked together with the Fauves. The Signal is an indication of the artist’s return to the colouristic system of his youth and evidence of the strength of the effect which the Fauvist artists had on him.

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RENÉ SEYSSAUD 1867-1952

A

ndré Dunoyer de Segonzac gave the following description of René Seyssaud’s painting: “The resonance of the colour, the richness of the manner, it is all the work of an instinctive painter who has sensed the beautiful land of Provence.”74 Two elements lay at the basis of Seyssaud’s painting: the influence of Provence with its southern colours and his own innate instinct. The eighty-five years of his life extend over the second half of the nineteenth century when he was formed as an artist and the first half of the twentieth century which saw the major part of his creative life. In the nineteenth century he would most likely have been a Romantic with the tempestuous expressivity of his painting and his worship of Victor Hugo. Not without cause, one of the critics wrote: “There is in Seyssaud an old, and moreover, attractive ferment of Romanticism... which imbues his works with something gloomy, tormented and disturbing.”75 In 1903 a critic writing for the Symbolists’ journal La Revue Blanche tried to find in Seyssaud features linking him to Symbolism, but the uniqueness of his painterly manner placed him outside any known tendency: Rude, raucous, brutal visions, the colour of which shouts or croaks, where the dab of paint coagulates in heavy clots, rears up in rugged stalactites. You ask yourself if you are in the presence of some crude genius, drunk on light, movement and noise, or if it is an effect of vacillating, doubt with certainty. It is something not, it must be admitted, snarled out but bawled.76

Up until the moment when Fauvist painting had formed and been given its name, the reaction to Seyssaud’s works at the Paris exhibitions was more than anything one of bewilderment. But the period of Seyssaud’s creative maturity at the beginning of the twentieth century coincided with the birth of Fauvism and contemporaries undoubtedly attributed his painting to that tendency. In 1902, the critic Georges Riat wrote: “He squeezes onto his palette the most ardent colours: vivid red, glaring blue, glowing yellow, bright green, which he hurls about with brutal energy...”77 If we did not know this comment applied to Seyssaud, it would be possible to think that Riat was speaking of Maurice de Vlaminck in 1905-1906. René Seyssaud was born in Marseilles on 16 June 1867. He drew from early childhood, began studying at the art school in Marseilles at the age of thirteen and by fourteen he was exhibiting and occasionally selling his works in one of the little shops in the city where he was noticed by his famous fellow-Marseillais Adolphe Monticelli. By the time Seyssaud was fifteen or sixteen he had attained absolute freedom in the texture and colour of his painting; he painted with the brush and the palette-knife, spreading large areas of paint across the canvas. “For an artist, like anybody else, seeing is nothing, understanding is everything,” he would love to repeat later.78 At the age of eighteen, after the death of his father, Seyssaud moved to live with his uncle at Avignon, where he continued his studies in the École des Beaux-Arts. Seyssaud’s professor there, who also became a friend, was the same Pierre Grivolas who was later to teach Chabaud. In 1892, Seyssaud began exhibiting his paintings in Paris, at the Salon du Champ de Mars and the Salon des Indépendants. Through the agency of Monticelli in 1897 the

René Seyssaud. Photograph.

181

René Seyssaud, Road, 1901. Oil on paper pasted on canvas, 30.7 x 48 cm. State Hermitage Museum, Saint Petersburg.

182

Provençal collector François Honnorat concluded a contract with Seyssaud. In that same year, the Parisian gallery Le Barc de Boutteville gave Seyssaud his first personal exhibition — sixty paintings. In 1899 Seyssaud was noticed by Ambroise Vollard and later by the Galerie Bernheim-Jeune who regularly organized his personal exhibitions. As early as 1903 and 1904, paintings by Seyssaud were acquired for the Musée du Luxembourg and the Marseilles Museum. He first exhibited in the Salon d’Automne in 1904, and in 1905, four of his paintings were on display there, although he did not become part of Matisse’s group. Nevertheless, in 1905, the critics naturally associated Seyssaud with Fauvism on the qualities of his painting. Despite the fact that he never experienced a lack of interest on the part of dealers and critics, Seyssaud never became a Parisian artist. The noisy, lively towns of Provence did not attract him either. In his youth, he lived for a long time on his uncle’s farm in Villes. It was there that he met Louise, the eleven-year-old daughter of a peasant. When she reached fifteen he married her and lived his whole life with her. They built a house in the hamlet of Saint-Chamas which became his favourite home. Although, with Louise for company, he travelled to paint not only in other corners of southern France but also in the north. Seyssaud existed in his own poetic world, carefully protected from the commonplaces of life by his loyal Louise. The house at Saint-Chamas opened its doors to many eccentrics, lovers of painting, peasant neighbours, and writers, including Seyssaud’s friend, the noted Provençal poet Joachim Gasquet. Once an exotic character appeared there — a dirty, hungry tramp who said that he was Auguste Chabaud. Chabaud was warmly received by the Seyssaud family and stayed on to paint in the owner’s studio. When he left he invited Seyssaud to visit him at Graveson. Seyssaud was most surprised when Chabaud’s “little farm” turned out to be a luxurious estate. Seyssaud understood the extravagance of Chabaud’s behaviour — in art they moved along the same path and their friendship lasted to the end of their lives. The unusual nature of his painting and the extravagance of his character made Seyssaud one of the most striking figures in Provence. After the Second World War, in the late 1940s and 1950s, the city of Marseilles honoured Seyssaud with a whole series of exhibitions, banquets, awards and films. But the artist was already too old to appreciate it all. Despite the fact that the fame of his paintings had by that time spread far beyond the bounds not only of Provence, but even of France, at the end of his life Seyssaud was very far from art as it had developed in the twentieth century. He remained isolated at Saint-Chamas and died in his house there on 24 September 1952. The Hermitage possesses two paintings by Seyssaud. In The Road (c. 1901), despite the fact that it dates from the period when the critics were noting in Seyssaud’s work a “Fauvist” blaze of colour, the picture exerts influence not through the colour, but rather by the unusualness of the proportions and the expressivity of the drawing with the brush. The human figure, so small on the wide road, the emptiness of the field, the windswept branches of the trees create an almost physical tension. The painting Ploughland was donated to the Soviet Union by the citizens of the commune of Saint-Chamas in 1949. Something which only just made an appearance in The Road is, here, taken to extremes: man’s single combat with nature, the jerky movement of the figures overcoming the resistance of the earth; abstracted contours, a viewpoint against the light and the coarse texture of the dabs of white which creates sharp contrasts on the twisted surface of the earth. Seyssaud conveys the effect of the Provençal light with no less effect than Chabaud. His painting has in it a unique, singular, wild force.

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AUGUSTE CHABAUD 1882-1955 GEORGES DUPUIS 1875-1932 HENRI LEBASQUE 1865-1937 PIERRE GIRIEUD 1876-1940

“M

y temperament is a good sieve: what passes through it comes out purified and needs no other colouring than the divine light of Provence, the most radiant in the universe,” Auguste Chabaud said.84 Chabaud considered that, for him, Fauvism was the only possible course he could take in his creative endeavours and sympathies. His own innate idiom as a painter has been accepted as belonging organically to this stream by the major researchers of Fauvism but only the most attentive biographers have been able to grasp the distinctive features of Chabaud’s work, which are bound up with his Provençal roots. “From the very outset of Fauvism he joined the current with a singularly powerful and original accent,” R. Cognat observes.79 The Provençal stamp speaks of Provence itself recreated in Chabaud’s dazzling, powerful painting: his name heads the list of the three greatest twentieth century Provençal painters — Auguste Chabaud, Mathieu Verdilhan, and René Seyssaud. It was precisely Chabaud’s Provençal character which led him to instinctive painting. He recollected with pride that in his youth he had snarled in the “cage of wild beasts,” had been noticed by Apollinaire and Salmon, and named among the most valiant Fauves. “What predominates with him is a creative rage,” A. Chamson writes. “He is classified (he needs some sort of classification) among the Fauve clan and the word suits him well, but it would be unjust to explain his art in terms of his belonging to a movement of which he, in his solitude, was one of the first creators.” 80 Auguste Chabaud was born in Nimes on 3 October 1882. In 1890, his family moved to his grandfather’s estate Mas de Martin in the commune of Graveson, halfway between Avignon and Tarascon. After the secondary school in Avignon, Chabaud studied from 1897 in the École des Beaux-Arts in the town under Pierre Grivolas who recommended his parents to send their son to Paris. In 1899, 17-year-old Chabaud entered Professor Fernand Cormon’s class at the École des Beaux-Arts and at the same time began studying at the Académie Julian and the Académie Carrière, where he met Henri Matisse, Jean Puy, and André Derain. If Chabaud had not had to leave Paris, their road would probably have been a common one. Chabaud felt at home in the Parisian setting. “I lived on the Butte [Montmartre], the last refuge of Bohemians and the spirit of liberty and it seemed to me that I had not left my village, so much did those little

Henri Lebasque, Before Bathing, c. 1907. Oil on canvas, 72 x 54 cm. Pushkin State Museum of Fine Arts, Moscow.

185

Auguste Chabaud, Village Landscape, 1910. Oil on cardboard, 77 x 107.5 cm. State Hermitage Museum, Saint Petersburg.

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provincial streets with their grilled windows, their stream and some chickens pecking away take me back there.”81 But the phylloxera plague devastated Chabaud’s father’s vineyards and ruined him financially. Auguste was obliged to find work as a sailor from 1901 and to do military service in Tunisia from 1903 to 1905. This was the reason why he did not exhibit together with his friends at the Salon d’Automne and was not among the first to earn the name of Fauve. Only in 1907 did Chabaud begin to exhibit at the Salon des Indépendants and in the cage aux fauves at the Salon d’Automne. (He continued to send his works there until the early 1930s.) At the same time he had his first one-man shows — in Toulouse in 1908, in the Galerie Bernheim-Jeune in Paris in 1912; while in 1910 he exhibited with other Fauves in the galleries owned by Berthe Weill and Sago. In 1913 paintings by Chabaud together with works by Matisse, Derain, and others presented Fauvism to the New York public. Chabaud spent the whole of the First World War at the front. When he was demobilized in 1919, he returned to Graveson where, in 1921, he married a local girl, Valentine Susini. For the rest of his life he remained “the hermit of Graveson” surrounded by his large family. From time to time he sent a few paintings to Paris; occasionally he worked in Marseilles. After his mother’s death in 1928 he managed the estate, while at the same time writing verse and novels, some of which were published. In 1937 and 1939 the Galerie Katia Granoff gave one-man shows of Chabaud; in 1950 a large retrospective exhibition was organized in Aix-en-Provence. In 1952, three years before his death. Chabaud returned to Paris after an absence of thirty years when the artistic and literary Cercle Volnes arranged a retrospective exhibition entitled “50 années de peinture” [50 years of painting] and in 1953 he was given the order of the Legion d’Honneur. Auguste Chabaud died on 23 May 1955 at Graveson. Chabaud’s painting, A Village Square (c. 1910, Hermitage), was bought by Ivan Morozov at the 1910 Salon d’Automne. The sharp contrasts of light and shade, large patches of colour and the juxtaposition not of warm and cold hues but of the blinding azure of the southern sky and the earth bleached beneath the sun create the atmosphere of Provence. At this time Chabaud was still using motifs similar to those of Van Dongen — the girls from Montmartre and the Médrano Circus — but the Provençal landscape gradually became the main theme of his painting. Chabaud discovered a surprising quality of nature in the south: the strength of the light is such that a painting does not require any red — in the present landscape it lies only in a subdued patch on the roof, and later it would almost entirely disappear from his works. He uses chrome and cadmium, a few earth colours and whites — an unusual set of paints for a Fauve! At the same time, for all the fairly large dimensions of the present landscape Chabaud is stinting in the use of large flat patches, so inclined towards an abstraction combined with expressivity that his painting clearly speaks in the idiom of the Fauves. In 1910 Chabaud went through the period of Cézannesque experiments with form which was common to all the Fauvist artists. Guillaume Apollinaire even listed him along-side Matisse, Derain, Rouault, Dufy, Puy and Van Dongen among those who turned to “le Cubisme instinctif.”82 Yet A Village Square with its colour and light, broad texture and free drawing with the brush is evidence that precisely the language of Fauvism accorded with his Provençal vision of nature. “My canvases... have their entire source in nature, the sole unshakeable foundation on which to construct a work of art and beyond which everything is folly.”83

187

188

At the 1908 Salon des Indépendants, Ivan Morozov purchased a landscape by the Le Havre-born artist Georges (Géo, Gustave Léon) Dupuis which was entitled The Quai Notre-Dame in Le Havre (c. 1908, Hermitage). Morozov’s subsequent attempts to find more paintings by this man proved fruitless. Dupuis’s painting is attractive for the purity and power of the colour scheme constructed on the basis of two hues: blue and red. The oil paint laid on the canvas in a fine, translucent layer creates the effect of watercolour, a medium in which the artist often worked. Although Dupuis graduated from the École des Arts Décoratifs, he was known for his graphic work, including book illustrations. The emergence of the Fauves at the 1905 Salon d’Automne produced such a strong impression on Dupuis that at the Salon des Indépendants he joined their ranks and twice (1908 and 1909) participated in joint exhibitions. Subsequently Dupuis lived a solitary life in his native Le Havre, leaving practically no trace of himself on the Parisian art scene. Henri Lebasque was unwilling for people to consider him a Fauve. Yet, Charles Classé called him a “Fauve modéré.”84 Being the same age as the Nabis artists, Lebasque was older than the majority of the Fauves, but that did not prevent him from forming friendships with Henri Matisse, Henri Manguin, and Georges Rouault (he served the last as a model). Dorival mentions him among the epigones of Fauvism, considering him less “wild.”85 The sole painting by Lebasque in the Russian collections represents the moment when he was at his closest to Fauvism. Henri Lebasque was born on 25 September 1865 at Champigné in Anjou. He studied at the École des Beaux-Arts in Paris under Professor Léon Bonnat. His meeting with Georges Seurat and Camille Pisarro was not without result, nor was his study of Impressionism. Lebasque travelled to England, Spain and Italy; he was fond of working on the Mediterranean coast, in Saint-Tropez, Nice, and Cannes. Until 1905 he painted mainly landscapes in an Impressionist manner which testify to his sensitivity for conveying sunlight and his knowledge of the technique of divisionism. His numerous nudes often come close to the soft manner of painting characteristic of the Nabis group. After the emergence of the Fauves at the 1905 Salon d’Automne, Lebasque’s style became more expansive and expressive. It seems probable that the impression made by the Fauves’ work superimposed itself on his primary pursuit — an interest in light, for the representation of which contrasts of pure colour play an indispensable role. The Fauvist tendency lived on in Lebasque’s art for a period of some twenty years, yet without eliminating in it that fine delicacy which was inherent in the artist’s nature. Lebasque died in August 1937 at Le Cannet in the south of France. Before Bathing (c. 1907, Pushkin Museum of Fine Arts) is a favourite motif in which all the charm of Lebasque’s art is present. The landscape is constructed on the subtlest transitions from the pink in the upper part of the canvas to the green tone of the grass in the foreground. But appearing among the shades of white are splashes of red, green, and yellow which lead to the pure colour used on the figure of the model being perceived as natural. Yet, in contrast to the classical “Fauves,” any sort of shock-tactic or harshness was alien to Lebasque’s character — he moderates the resonance of the reds, greens and blues with pale blue shadows on the material. Indivisibly combined in this painting are the intelligence of the Nabis’ art and a purely Fauvist joy in working with colour straight out of the tube. “He was linked to the Fauves by the thing which primarily united them all: colour. Pierre Girieud made himself a palette no less violent than that of Van Dongen or Henri

Georges Dupuis, Notre Dame-Embankment, Le Havre, c. 1908. Oil on canvas, 58 x 71.5 cm. State Hermitage Museum, Saint Petersburg.

189

Pierre Girieud, Peonies, 1906. Oil on canvas, 81.5 x 65.5 cm. State Hermitage Museum, Saint Petersburg.

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Matisse and one which was his alone through the particular choice of yellows, blues and greens, punctuated with vermilion. But on the canvas he knew how, by the distribution of the colours, to reduce the resonance of several tones.”86 This characterization of Girieud which Andre Salmon gave on two occasions (in 1912 and 1920) is typical of the opinion which formed in the course of his long creative life. Pierre Paul Girieud was yet another artist from Provence who became part of the Fauvist movement. Born in Marseilles, he appeared in Paris at the turn of the century. In 1902, he exhibited at a group exhibition in Berthe Weill’s gallery together with Pablo Picasso and a few other artists. André Warnod lists his paintings among the first purchases that Berthe Weill made together with works by Matisse and Dufy.87 Most likely the future Fauves were precisely the group to which his own emerging creative tendencies linked him from the outset. From 1903 onwards he regularly exhibited with Matisse’s group at the Salon des Indépendants and from 1904 at the Salon d’Automne. Later Girieud presented his work together with the Fauves in Paris and at Izdebsky’s Salon in 1910. His painting was an element in the collective picture of Fauvist creation. It has been suggested that at the 1905 Salon d’Automne, Girieud exhibited in the same hall as the Fauves not in the section devoted to the painting of Gustave Moreau’s pupils, but alongside Derain, Vlaminck, and Van Dongen. In any case, the critics did not distinguish him from them: Fagus names him along with Matisse. Derain, Manguin, and Camoin among the “faux audacieux, trop savants debutants” giving due credit both to their boldness and their high professional standard; Camille Mauclair put Girieud together with other Fauves in the “class of Vollard.”88 At the 1905 Salon d’Automne Girieud displayed five still lifes, that being one of his preferred genres at the time. But Girieud, in Salmon’s words, “an artist of high culture and remarkably gifted,”89 had a leaning towards the Old Masters and monumental painting. A journey to Italy furthered this. It is possible that in Provence he was given a nudge in that direction again by a poet from Aix, the friend of Cézanne and Seyssaud, Joachim Gasquet, who summoned his compatriots to create monumental art. Girieud’s tendency towards decorative painting led him to the Société des amis de Gauguin. His painting Hommage a Gauguin, bought by the state after the 1906 Salon d’Automne and displayed in the hall of the town hall at Pont Aven, was painted on the subject of the Last Supper only, instead of Christ, the artist depicted Gauguin. In the First World War, Girieud was at the front. After the war his easel paintings ceased to appear at exhibitions. He worked exclusively on frescoes — among his famous works are those for the Chateau de Pradine, the University of Poitiers, the town hall of Ivry, and the Tower of Metals at the International Exhibition of Decorative Arts held in Paris in 1925. Girieud died in Paris in 1940. The still life Peonies (1906, Hermitage) dates from the time when Gineud was in active union with the Fauves and it displays a characteristic quality of the painting of that period — the glaring nature of flat patches of pure colour, the contrasts between which are diminished by the appearance of the violet-pink peonies and the reflexes on the vase. Yet Girieud does not possess the instinctive freedom of manner we find in his fellows. The work rather evokes associations with a Gauguinesque cloisonnism. In 1909 Charles Morice wrote of Girieud’s colours at the seventh exhibition of the Salon d’Automne: “M. Pierre Girieud has concluded... a pact of reason with nature. For this man still and most singularly the importance of the inner life is extreme: his decorative compositions proclaim the plastic deliberateness of a thought.”90

NOTES 1

Quoted from L. Chaumeil, Von Dongen, Geneva, 1967, p. 87.

2

Quoted from M. Giry, « Le Salon d’automne de 1905 », Information d’histoire de l’art, 1968, n°1, p. 16.

3

Ch. Chassé, « L’Histoire du Fauvisme revue et corrigée », Connaissance des arts, oct. 1962, p. 54; Ch. Oppler, Fauvism Reexamined, Ph. D. Dissertation, Columbian University, New York, 1969.

192

4

M. Hoog, « La Direction des beaux-arts et les Fauves 1903-1905 », Arts de France, 1963, p. 363.

5

C. Mauclair. « La Peinture et la sculpture au Salon d’automne », L’Art décoratif, 1905, p. 222.

6

Quoted from: M. Giry, « Le Salon d’automne de 1905 », L’Information d’histoire de l’art, 1968, vol.1, p. 21.

7

Quoted from: Ch. Chassé, Les Fauves et leur temps, Lausanne-Paris, 1963, p. 115.

8

Quoted from: J. E. Müller, Le Fauvisme, Paris, 1956, p. 5.

9

Quoted from: J. P Crespelle, Vlaminck fauve de la peinture, Paris, 1958, p. 163.

10

M. Giry, « Le Salon d’automne de 1905 », L’Information d’histoire de l’art, 1968, n°1, p. 18.

11

A. Salmon, L’Air de la Butte, Paris, 1945, p. 25.

12

A. Salmon, Souvenirs sans fin. Deuxième Epoque (1908-1920), Paris. 1956, p. 24.

13

A. Salmon, L’Air de la butte, Paris, 1945, p. 36.

14

Quoted from: J. P. Crespelle, Vlaminck fauve de la peinture, Paris, 1958, p . 228.

15

Ch. Chassé, Les Fauves et leur temps, Lausanne-Paris, 1963, p. 3.

16

Quoted from: M. Genevoix, Vlaminck, Paris, 1983, p. 3.

17

Quoted from: Ch. Chassé, Les Fauves et leur temps, Lausanne-Paris, 1963, p. 137.

18

M. Serullaz, « Delacroix et le Fauvisme », La Revue du Louvre, 1971, n°3, p. 217.

19

A. Derain, Lettres à Vlaminck, Paris, 1955, p. 116.

20

Quoted from: Ch. Chassé, Les Fauves et leur temps, Lausanne-Paris, 1963, p. 12.

21

Quoted from: G. Diehl, André Derain, Paris, 1967, p. 36.

22

F. Carco, M. de Vlaminck, Paris, 1920, p. 13.

23

Quoted from: M. Puy, Jean Puy, Paris, 1920, p. 14.

24

Quoted from: Ed. Des Courières, Van Dongen, Paris, 1925, p. 20.

25

Quoted from: J. P. Crespelle, Vlaminck fauve de la peinture, Paris, 1958, p. 118.

26

Quoted from: J. P. Crespelle, Vlaminck fauve de la peinture, Paris, 1958, p. 28.

27

M. Vlaminck, Communications, Dancing, Paris, 1921 (sans pagination).

28

Quoted from: J. P. Crespelle, Vlaminck fauve de la peinture, Paris, 1958, p. 242.

29

Quoted from: G. Diehl, Henri Matisse, Paris, 1954, p. 90.

30

Quoted from: R. Escholier, Matisse, Paris, 1938, p. 98.

31

Quoted from: B. Dorival, Les Étapes de la peinture française contemporaine, Paris, 1944, vol. 2, p. 94.

32

Quoted from: J. Laude, La Peinture française (1905-1914) et « l’art nègre », Paris, 1968, p. 137.

33

Quoted from: R. Escholier, Matisse, Paris, 1938, p. 155.

34

Quoted from: M. Genevoix, Vlaminck, Paris, 1983, p. 11.

35

Ch. Chassé, Les Fauves et leur temps, Lausanne-Paris, 1963, p. 111.

36

Quoted from: G. Diehl, André Derain, Paris, 1967, p. 30.

37

Quoted from: G. Diehl, Ibid., p. 36.

38

Quoted from: R. Escholier, La Peinture française du XXe siècle, Paris, 1937, p. 49.

39

Quoted from: G. Diehl, André Derain, Paris, 1967, p. 14.

40

Quoted from: A. Salmon, Derain et son œuvre, Paris, 1923, p. 8.

41

Quoted from: G. Diehl, André Derain, Paris, 1967, p. 47.

42

B. Dorival, Les Étapes de la peinture française contemporaine, Paris, 1944, vol. 2, p. 123.

43

Quoted from: Ch. Chassé, Les Fauves et leur temps, Lausanne-Paris, 1963, p. 79.

44

Quoted from: Ch. Chassé, Ibid.

45

See: M. Giry, « Le Salon d’automne de 1905 », L’Information d’histoire de l’art, 1968, n°1, p. 20.

46

Quoted from: M. Marquet, Albert Marquet, Paris, 1955, p. 10.

193

194

47

See: Albert Marquet. München. Staatlische Galerie im Lenbachhaus, 1976, p. 58.

48

Quoted from: J. P. Crespelle, Vlaminck fauve de la peinture, Paris, 1958, p. 227.

49

B. Dorival, Les Étapes de la peinture française contemporaine, Paris, 1944, vol. 2, p. 119.

50

P. Courthion, Art independent, Paris, 1958.

51

Quoted from: B. Dorival, Les Étapes de la peinture française contemporaine, Paris, 1944, vol. 2, 1905-1911.

52

Quoted from: A. Warnod, Ceux de la Butte, Paris, 1947, p. 200.

53

B. Dorival, Les Étapes de la peinture française contemporaine, Paris, 1944, vol. 2, p. 159.

54

B. Dorival, lbid., p. 154.

55

B. Dorival, Ibid., p. 95.

56

Quoted from: Ch. Chassé, Les Fauves et leur temps, Lausanne-Paris, 1963, p. 96.

57

Quoted from: P. Cabanne, Manguin, Paris, Neuchâtel, 1964, p. 65.

58

Quoted from: P. Cabanne, Ibid., p. 50.

59

Quoted from: P. Cabanne, Ibid., p. 48.

60

Quoted from: P. Cabanne, Ibid., p. 50.

61

Quoted from: L. Chaumeil, Van Dongen, Genève, 1967, p. 90.

62

Quoted from: L. Chaumeil, Ibid., p. 43.

63

Quoted from: J. P. Crespelle, Montmartre vivant, Paris, 1964, p. 69.

64

Quoted from: L.Chaumeil, Van Dongen, Genève, 1967, p. 87.

65

A. Salmon, L’Air de la butte, Paris, 1945, p. 156.

66

B. Dorival, Les Étapes de la peinture française contemporaine, Paris, 1944. vol. 2, 1905-1911, p. 55.

67

Quoted from: J. P. Crespelle, Vlaminck fauve de la peinture, Paris, 1958, p. 230.

68

B. Dorival, Les Étapes de la peinture française contemporaine, Paris, 1944, vol. 2, p. 133.

69

Quoted from: M. Puy, Jean Puy, Paris, 1920, p. 14.

70

Quoted from: F. X. Staub, « Jean Puy », Information d’histoire de l’art, 1968, n°1, p. 33.

71

R. Huyghe, Les Contemporains, Paris, 1939 ; B. Dorival, Les Étapes de la peinture française contemporaine, Paris, 1944, vol. 2; Ch. Chassé, Les Fauves et leur temps, Lausanne-Paris, 1963; Ch. Chassé, « L’Histoire du Fauvisme revue et corrigée », Connaissance des arts, oct. 1962 ; F. Cachin, « Des XXe à l’Europe », Art de France, 1963.

72

Quoted from: M. Giry, « Le Salon des indépendants de 1905 », L’Information d’histoire de l’art, 1970, n°1, p. 112.

73

Quoted from: Louis Valtat. Musée Galliera, Paris, 1956, p. 3.

74

Quoted from: Ch. Mauron, J. Tourette, Seyssaud, Marseille, p. 46.

75

I. Silvestre, Seyssaud, documents et souvenirs, Saint-Chamas, n. d., p. 126.

76

Quoted from: Ch. Chassé, Les Fauves et leur temps, Lausanne-Paris, p. 46.

77

Quoted from: Ibid., p. 49.

78

Quoted from: Ch. Mauron, J. Tourette, Seyssaud, Marseille, n. d.

79

A. Chabaud, Ibid., p. 10.

80

Quoted from: A. Chabaud, Dans les Collections privées, Marseille, January-February 1959, p. 4.

81

Auguste Chabaud, Musee des Beaux-Arts d’Orleans, 1986. p. 114.

82

G. Apollinaire, Les Peintres cubistes, Paris, 1913, p. 22.

83

Auguste Chabaud. Musée des beaux-arts d’Orléans, 1986, p. 114.

84

Ch. Chassé, Les Fauves et leur temps, Lausanne-Paris, 1963, p. 168.

85

B. Dorival, Les Étapes de la peinture française contemporaine, Paris, 1944, vol. 2, p. 187.

86

A. Salmon, L’Art vivant, Paris, 1920, p. 53.

87

A. Warnod, Fils de Montmartre. Souvenirs, Paris, 1955, p. 50.

88

Voir : M. Giry, « Le Salon d’automne de 1905 ». L’Information d’histoire de l’art, 1968, n°1, p. 20.

89

A. Salmon, L’Art vivant, Paris, 1920, p. 54.

90

Ch. Morice, « Le Septième Salon d’automne », Mercure de France, November-December 1909, vol. 2, p. 149.

195

INDEX Unknown Artist Albert Marquet, Photograph André Derain, Photograph Georges Rouault, Photograph Henri Le Fauconnier, Sketch Henri Manguin, Photograph Henri Matisse, Photograph Jean Puy, Sketch Kees Van Dongen, Photograph Louis Valtat, Photograph Maurice de Vlaminck, Photograph Othon Friesz, Photograph Raoul Dufy, Photograph René Seyssaud, Photograph C

D

Chabaud, Auguste Village Landscape, 1910

187

Derain, André The Castle or The New Castle in La Roche Guyon, c. 1910 Cliffs, 1912 Drying the Sails, 1905 Grove, c. 1912 Houses on the Waterfront, 1910 Landscape with a Boat by the Bank, c. 1915 Martigues (Harbour in Provence), 1913 The Old Bridge, c. 1910 Path in the Forest of Fontainebleau, 1911 Port, c. 1905 Portrait of an Unknown Man Reading a Newspaper (Chevalier X), 1911 Road in the Mountains, 1907 Still Life in Front of the Window, 1912-1913 Still Life with Earthen Jug and White Napkin, 1912 Table and Chairs, 1912-1913 Tree-Trunks, 1912-1913

31 37 16 102 36 27 26 29 28 97 100 96 99 12 13 103

Dufy, Raoul 14 July in Deauville, 1933 The Antibes, 1926 Portrait of Suzanne Dufy, the Artist’s Sister, 1904 196

104 94 152 174 136 66 158 144 166 84 124 116 180

120-121 119 122

F

G

L

M

Dupuis, Georges Notre Dame-Embankment, Le Havre, c. 1908

188

Friesz, Othon Flowers, 1910 Hill, 1908 Roofs and the Cathedral at Rouen, 1908 Snow in Munich, 1909 Still Life with a Statuette of Buddha, 1909 Temptation (Adam and Eve), c. 1910 Travaux d’Automne (Autumn Works), 1907 Trees in Cassis, 1909

132 127 130 131 129 135 126 134

Girieud, Pierre Peonies, 1906

191

Le Fauconnier, Henri Lake, 1911 The Signal, 1915 Village among the Rocks, c. 1910

177 176 179

Lebasque, Henri Before Bathing, c. 1907

184

Manguin, Henri Flowers, 1915 Landscape at St Tropez, 1905 Morning at Cavaliere, 1906 Walk at St Tropez, 1905 Woman Bather, 1906

141 139 142 138 143

Marquet, Albert Bay of Naples, 1909 Flood in Paris, c. 1910 Harbour at Menton, 1905 Louvre Embankment and the New Bridge, 1906 Paris in Winter, The Quai Bourbon, 1907

114 34 112 111 32 197

The Pont Saint-Michel in Paris, The Quai des Augustins, 1908 The Pont Saint-Michel in Winter, 1908 Rainy Day. Notre Dame du Paris, 1910 Sun Over Paris (Sun Seen Through the Trees), c. 1910 Vesuvius, c. 1909 View of Saint-Jean-de-Luz, 1907 View of the Seine and the Monument to Henri IV, c. 1906 Matisse, Henri Arab Coffeehouse, 1913 Blue Pot and Lemon, 1897 Bouquet (Vase with Two Handles), 1907 Bouquet of Flowers on a Veranda, c. 1912 Calla Lilies, Irises and Mimosas, 1913 Conversation, 1908-1912 The Dance, 1909-1910 Dishes and Fruit, c. 1901 Dishes and Fruit on a Red and Black Carpet (Le Tapis Rouge), 1906 Entrance to the Casbah, 1912-1913 Fruits and Teapot, 1898 Game of Bowls, 1908 Girl with Tulips, 1910 Goldfish, 1911 Landscape viewed from a Window, 1912 Moroccan in Green, 1913 Music, 1910 Nasturtiums with ‘Dance’ (II), 1912 Nude, Black and Gold, 1908 Nude, Study, 1908 Nymph and Satyr, 1909 On the Terrace, 1912 Painter’s Family, 1911 Path in the Bois de Boulogne, c. 1902 Portrait of Lydia Delectorskaya, 1947 Portrait of the Artist’s Wife, 1913 The Red Room (Harmony in Red), 1908 Seated Woman, 1908 Seville Still Life, c. 1910-1911 Spanish Girl with Tambourine, 1909 Spanish Still Life, c. 1910-1911 Statuette and Vases on Oriental Carpet or Still Life in Red of Venice, 1908 Still Life with a Seashell on Black Marble, 1940 Still Life with Blue Tablecloth, 1909 Still Life with ‘The Dance’, 1909 View of Collioure, c. 1905 198

35 33 109 106 115 110 107

61 8-9 21 22 23 58-59 57 70 71 60 11 78 44 6 82 81 72-73 75 42 43 76-77 83 14-15 24 62 80 68-69 42 48-49 47 53 52 64-65 50 54-55 17

Woman in Green, 1909 Woman on a Terrace, 1906 Young Woman in a Blue Blouse (Portrait of Lydia Delectorskaya), 1939 P

R

S

V

45 18-19 63

Puy, Jean In the Studio, 1912 Landscape, c. 1903 Portrait of the Artist's Wife, 1909 The Roman Bridge in Saint-Maurice Summer, 1906

164 161 165 163 160

Rouault, Georges Bathing in a Lake, 1907 Les Filles (The Girls), 1907 Spring, 1911

156 157 155

Seyssaud, René Road, 1901

183

Valtat, Louis Anthéor Bay, c. 1906-1907 Boat, 1899 The Farm, c. 1907 Girls Playing with a Lion Cub, c. 1905 Hut in the Wood, c. 1906 In the South of France, c. 1908 Sunlight under the Trees, c. 1908-1909 Violet Rocks (Sea Tide), 1900 Young Women in the Garden, c. 1898

172 169 40 38 168 41 39 171 173

Van Dongen, Kees Antonia La Coquinera, c. 1906 Lady in Black Gloves, 1907-1908 The Red Dancer, 1907 Spanish Woman, 1910-1911 Woman in a Black Hat, 1908

151 146 147 150 149

Vlaminck, Maurice de A Barge on the Seine River, 1905-1906 Bougival, c. 1909 Landscape at Auvers, 1920s Landscape with a House on the Hill, c. 1925-1926 Landscape with River, 1912 Town, c. 1908-1909

87 89 92 93 90 88 199

Art of Century Collection

B

Abstract Expressionism

Dadaism

Post-Impressionism

Abstraction

Early Italian Painting

The Pre-Raphaelites

American Scene

Expressionism

The Viennese Secession

Arts & Crafts

Fauvism

Rayonnism

Art Deco

Free Figuration

Realism

Art Informel

Futurism

Regionalism

Art Nouveau

Gothic Art

Renaissance Art

Arte Povera

Hudson River School

Rococo

Ashcan School

Impressionism

Romanesque Art

Baroque Art

Mannerism

Romanticism

Bauhaus

The Nabis

Russian Avant-Garde

Byzantine Art

Naive Art

School of Barbizon

Camden Town Group

Naturalism

Social Realism

COBRA

Neoclassicism

Surrealism

Constructivism

New Realism

Symbolism

Cubism

Pop Art

orn at the dawn of the 20th century, Fauvism burst onto the artistic scene at the 1905 Salon d'Automne with great controversy by throwing bright, vibrant colours in the face of artistic convention. Fuelled by change, artists like Matisse, Derain, and Vlaminck searched for a new chromatic language by using colour out of its habitual context. Freed from the strict technique advocated by the École des Beaux-Arts, they used colour as their main resource, their only standard seen in flat tints, saturating their stunning paintings. The author invites us to experience this vivid artistic evolution that, although encompassing a short amount of time, left its mark on the path to modernity.