Even those of us not particularly well-versed in art history have heard of a painting style called fauvism — and probably have never considered what it has to do with fauve, the French word for a wild beast. In fact, the two have everything to do with one another, at least in the sense of how certain critics regarded certain artists in the early twentieth century. One of the most notable of those artists was Henri Matisse, who since the end of the nineteenth century had been exploring the possibilities of his decision to “lean into the dramatic power of color,” as Evan “Nerdwriter” Puschak puts it in the new video above.
It was Matisse’s unconventional use of color, emotionally powerful but not strictly realistic, that eventually got him labeled a wild beast. Even before that, in his famous 1904 Luxe, Calme et Volupté, which has its origins in a stay in St. Tropez, you can “feel Matisse forging his own path. His colors are rebelling against their subjects. The painting is anarchic, fantastical. It’s pulsing with wild energy.” He continued this work on a trip to the southern fishing village of Collioure, “and even after more than a century, the paintings that resulted “still retain their defiant power; the colors still sing with the daring, the creative recklessness of that summer.”
In essence, what shocked about Matisse and the other fauvists’ art was its substitution of objectivity with subjectivity, most noticeably in its colors, but in subtler elements as well. As the years went on — with support coming from not the establishment but far-sighted collectors — Matisse “learned how to use color to define form itself,” creating paintings that “expressed deep, primal feelings and rhythms.” This evolution culminated in La Danse, whose “shocking scarlet” used to render “naked, dancing, leaping, spinning figures who are less like people than mythological satyrs” drew harsher opprobrium than anything he’d shown before.
But then, “you can’t expect the instantaneous acceptance of something radically new. If it was accepted, it wouldn’t be radical.” Today, “knowing the directions that modern art went in, we now can appreciate the full significance of Matisse’s work. We can be shocked at it without being scandalized.” And we can recognize that he discovered a universally resonant aesthetic that most of his contemporaries didn’t understand — or at least it seems that way to me, more than a century later and on the other side of the world, where his art now enjoys such a wide appeal that it adorns the iced-coffee bottles at convenience stores.
Related content:
Henri Matisse Illustrates Baudelaire’s Censored Poetry Collection, Les Fleurs du Mal
Hear Gertrude Stein Read Works Inspired by Matisse, Picasso, and T.S. Eliot (1934)
Henri Matisse Illustrates James Joyce’s Ulysses (1935)
Based in Seoul, Colin Marshall writes and broadcasts on cities, language, and culture. His projects include the Substack newsletter Books on Cities and the book The Stateless City: a Walk through 21st-Century Los Angeles. Follow him on Twitter at @colinmarshall or on Facebook.
