Passuth Krisztina – Szücs György – Gosztonyi Ferenc szerk.: Hungarian Fauves from Paris to Nagybánya 1904–1914 (A Magyar Nemzeti Galéria kiadványai 2006/1)

AT HOME AND ABROAD - JACK FLAM: Fauvism, Cubism, and European Modernism

JACK FLAM Fauvism, Cubism, and European Modernism It is one of the curiosities of early Hungarian modernism that while it witnessed a strong manifestation of a "Fauve" style in painting, Cubism was less directly influential. The great energy of the Fauve style, along with its non-conformist and anti-academic attitudes, appealed to a number of Hungarian artists in the years between 1905 and 1910. In fact, Béla Czóbel, one of the most celebrated of the Hungarian Fauves, exhibited with the Parisian painters who first provoked the name of the style. In 1907, when Michel Puy published his essay "Les Fauves," the first study that treated the artists involved as a more or less coherent group, Czóbel was the only foreigner included in Puy's description of the original movement.

1 Hungary having been in a real sense implicated in beginnings of the Fauve movement, it is fitting that the style flourished there to such a degree, especially as manifested in the work of artists such as Czóbel, Bálint, Berény, Kernstok, Márffy, Lampérth, and their colleagues. The mixture of expressionistic energy and constructive wilfulness in Hungarian Fauvism situates it in a most interesting way within the polarity between Fauvism and Cubism, the two major French styles that emerged during the early part of the twentieth century. 1. The short life of Fauvism and its relation to Cubism raise a number of interesting questions with regard to avant-garde French painting during the early years of the century. One question has to do with why, since Fauve painting was so short-lived, it has continued to remain so vivid in the art-historical imagination. (Kahnweiler, for example, writing in 1915, characterized the the word "fauve" as "absurde," and believed it to be "heureusement disparu"; but after World War I, the term became firmly established.)

2 Another has to do with just how Fauve and Cubist painting relate to each other, and what the rise of Cubism tells us about the ideals that underlay Fauve painting. It also seems that some of the issues raised by the relationship between Fauvism and Cubism are of particular interest now, a century later, in that they appear to remain open

—and may be indicative of an unresolvable tension that lies at the heart of modern art in general. In the standard histories of modern art, Fauvism is considered the first major twentieth-century movement

—even though the artists associated with it were not particularly united and many of them denied that such a movement ever existed. Around 1905, the story goes, a group of young artists led by Henri Matisse began to revolutionize European painting by employing brash color, bold brushwork, and loose drawing. The journalist Louis Vauxcelles, a somewhat uneasy supporter of avant-garde painting, is supposed to have given the movement its name in his review of the 1905 Salon d'Automne, where he referred to these artists as "fauves." But the naming of Fauvism was actually more complicated than that, and the term did not really catch on until 1907, when Fauve painting was more or less finished.

3 It is perhaps no mere coincidence that the origin of the word "cubisme" is also generally (though mistakenly) attributed to Vauxcelles, and that it, too, came into general use after there had been a radical transformation in the style that it was supposed to describe. Set side by side, Fauvism and Cubism make an appealing pair as the first two major twentiethcentury painting styles, evoking as they do the Nietzschean polarity between the Dionysian and the Apollonian that was so attractive at the beginning of the century. But in fact, they are both imprecise stylistic terms which tend to oversimplify the situation of French painting during the first decade of the century. What I mean by "situation" may be illuminated not only by looking at the paintings, but also by looking into the origins of the terms that were used to characterize them. The word "fauve," for example, tells us more about early twentieth century attitudes toward art that appeared to violate social and ethical norms than it does about the painting style that it is supposed to describe. Before it came into use, the younger painters had been associated with terms such as "Invertébrés" and "Incohérents" which (like "fauves") referred as much to their violation of good taste as to the apparent formlessness of their art.

4 In fact, Vauxcelles used the word "fauves" in two very different ways in his famous 1905 Salon review. The first time, it was used to characterize the anticipated reaction of the philistines and academics, who would presumably pounce on