Fauvism is a style of painting in which color no longer has to match what the eye sees: a face can be green, a sea red, and the brushstrokes stay loose and visible.
It was practiced in France from about 1905 to 1910 by Henri Matisse, André Derain and a circle of friends. The name is French for "the wild beasts," a critic's joke at a Paris exhibition in 1905.
The picture that best shows why visitors laughed is Woman with a Hat, a portrait Matisse made of his wife Amélie and sent to that exhibition. Strokes of green cross her face, and the hat on her head is a jumble of bright touches.
Her face and the background are laid in with broad, sketchy patches, and in places the bare canvas still shows between them. None of these colors tries to describe skin, hair or fabric.
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The exhibition was the Salon d'Automne, or "Autumn Salon," a yearly show of new art. In 1905 its hanging committee, the people who decided where each picture went, was led by the painter Georges Desvallières, an old friend of Matisse.
Desvallières put the most colorful canvases together in one gallery, Room VII. Matisse, Derain and their friends ended up side by side, in a room no visitor could miss.
In the middle of it stood two sculptures by Albert Marque, smooth and calm, in the manner of the Italian Renaissance. The critic Louis Vauxcelles saw them surrounded by what he called an "orgy of pure tones," and he thought of Donatello, the great sculptor of fifteenth-century Florence.
His quip was "Donatello chez les fauves," Donatello among the wild beasts. Vauxcelles printed it in Gil Blas, the Paris daily he wrote for, and from there the nickname spread to the whole group, although the painters had never chosen it.
Most of them were old friends. To see why they shared a room in 1905, their student days in Paris are the place to start.
Gustave Moreau's pupils
Many had trained under Gustave Moreau, a painter of myths and legends who taught at the École des Beaux-Arts, the state art school in Paris…
What You'll Discover
The summer that changed Matisse's colors.
What Van Gogh gave the painters of Chatou.
Why a green stripe runs down a face.
Why two Americans bought the most mocked picture.
Why the wild beasts scattered so quickly.