13 FEATURES of FAUVISM most important

Fauvism is considered the first pictorial movement of modern art of the 20th century, although its components more than make up a manifest movement, they constitute a group of painters with common interests and that between 1905 and 1908 coincided in the desire to break with Impressionism and tradition. His initial inspiration were post-impressionists such as Vincent van Gogh, Paul Gauguin, Georges Seurat and Paul Cézanne, although they took the liberation of color to its maximum. An intense use of color that earned them the nickname of fauves or "wild beasts."

In this lesson from unPROFESOR.com we offer you the outstanding Fauvism features so you can understand a unique and groundbreaking style.

Before starting to talk about the characteristics of Fauvism, we want to review the chronology of this movement. So here's a summary of fauvism and his evolution as an artistic current.

First steps of Fauvism

Fauvism took its first steps in the Paris Autumn Salon in 1905. Room number 8 was dedicated to

Henry Matisse, Maurice Vlaminck and André Derain, among others. His works scandalized the public, especially the more conservative critics, for their intense colors and their arbitrary and incoherent use.

An exhibition so shocking that critics described them as beasts or fauves, a name that the artists assumed as their own and called the style Fauvism. As we have already pointed out, the Fauvists did not have a programmatic manifesto, diluting the movement in 1908, his influence being the most important for the following avant-gardes artistic.

Consolidation

Despite initial criticism, the Fauvists enjoyed a great commercial success after that first exposure. In addition, they were featured in other exhibitions during the following years, becoming one of the main attractions in the Salon des Indépendants in 1907, in a large room nicknamed "The Den of the Fauvists."

Other artists began to join the central nucleus of Matisse, Derain and de Vlaminck, including Othon Friesz, Georges Rouault, Kees van Dongen, Georges Braque and Raoul Dufy. The group traveled together, shared studies and exchanged ideas after the initial heyday of Fauvism.

His tendency to distort color and shape to express the emotions and sensations of the painter It influenced the expressionists, a longer-lived movement with more cohesion among its members. The German Expressionists, with figures such as Ernst Ludwig Kirchner and Karl Schmidt-Rottluff, continued their aggressive use of color bordering on the grotesque and cartoonish.

End of the Fauve movement

The disappearance of Fauvism in 1908 was also associated with a new interest in work of Cézanne, artist with a more restricted color palette and focusing more on scale and color gradations. For that year, the Fauvists followed different paths. Thus, Braque began to develop cubism with Picasso, Derain was also tempted by cubism and the rest began to work on other styles.

To finish this lesson on the characteristics of Fauvism it is important that we focus on the style of the movement. The fauve artists They bet on a specific technique that is characterized by the following:

• One of its most identifiable characteristics is color separation from your descriptive and representative purpose and allow it to exist as an independent element. According to the Fauvists, color could show and project a mood and paint a canvas without having to be faithful to the natural world as established by the Impressionists.
• The color palette is bold, using colors arbitrarily and seeking the sensation of dissonance in order to break the association of color with the real of the object that is represented.
• The line is also impulsive, in search of the genuine, to the wild, to what has not been influenced by the civilized.
• The Fauvists were also looking for a general balance of composition. Thus, the saturated colors and the simplified forms take are distributed throughout the pictorial space, generating an intense, strong and unified visual impression.
• This movement value individual expression, acquiring more relevance the emotional response of the painter and his intuition over the academic.
• No interest in perspective or modeling. The figures are flat and defined by thick contours.
• Also looking for spontaneity of the strokes, without definition, unfinished.
• The Fauvists they go back to work in the studio, leaving aside the work in the open air advocated by the Impressionists. They are more interested in plastic language than plastic language.
• The topics further treated by the Fauvists are the rportraits, landscapes, everyday objects, indoor scenes and idyllic recreations of nature.