Fauvism and Expressionism

Van Gogh and Gauguin had shown that color could carry feeling and need not copy nature. Around 1905 younger painters took the next step and used color with no regard for what things "really" look like.

Fauvism

Describe. Henri Matisse (1869 to 1954) painted his wife, Amélie, in a huge, elaborate hat, holding a fan. Analyze. Her face is streaked with green, yellow and pink; the background is patches of turquoise, pink and orange; the hat is a pile of loose, bright strokes. Nothing is smoothly blended, and much of the brushwork is left raw. Interpret. Color here builds the picture and its mood, not the description of skin and cloth. At the 1905 Salon d'Automne in Paris, critics mocked it, and the critic Louis Vauxcelles called Matisse and his friends fauves, "wild beasts." The name stuck: Fauvism. The painting was bought by the American writers Leo and Gertrude Stein.

André Derain (1880 to 1954) painted London for the dealer Ambroise Vollard in 1906: a yellow sky, an orange road, a river in green and blue. He knew Monet's misty views of the Thames and answered them with pure, hot color.

Expressionism

In Germany, two groups pushed color and distortion toward inner feeling. Die Brücke ("The Bridge") was founded in Dresden in 1905 by Ernst Ludwig Kirchner and fellow architecture students. In Munich in 1911 Wassily Kandinsky and Franz Marc formed Der Blaue Reiter ("The Blue Rider"), with an almanac and exhibitions. Their forerunner was the Norwegian Edvard Munch, whose The Scream (1893) turns a sunset into a cry of anxiety.

In Street, Dresden (1908), Kirchner tilted the pavement up into a pink slope and made the crowd's faces mask-like, to express the strangeness of the modern city. Franz Marc (1880 to 1916) painted animals as symbols of innocence; in The Large Blue Horses (1911) blue stands for the spiritual, in curving forms echoed by red hills.