Fauvism is considered the first modern art movement of the 20th century. In 1905, the groundbreaking Fauvist exhibition at the French Salon d’Automne debuted the bright, expressive paintings of Henri Matisse, André Derain, Maurice de Vlaminck, and Kees van Dongen, prompting the critic Louis Vauxcelles (who would later give Cubism its name) to dub the painters fauves, French for “wild beasts.” The Fauvists drew from the spontaneous painting styles of Post-Impressionists such as Paul Gauguin, Paul Cézanne, and Vincent van Gogh, but took painting even further into abstraction. Unlike their predecessors, the Fauvists believed that color could be non-representational, applying vibrant pigments (often straight from the paint tube) in radical and unexpected ways, such as a nude woman painted in blue or an artist’s studio colored entirely in red. “When I put down a green, it doesn’t mean grass; and when I put down a blue, it doesn’t mean the sky,” Matisse explained. By 1908 in France, Fauvism had been eclipsed by Cubism as the most powerful influence on avant-garde artists, yet the movement’s perspective on color continued to influence developments in abstraction well into the 20th century.
