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
Matisse's paintings like wild beasts. Vauxcelles wrote that Matisse was courageous, "car son envoi — il le sait, de reste — aura le sort d'une vierge chrétienne livrée aux fauves du Cirque." Later in the same review, Vauxcelles used the word in the opposite way, to characterize the effect created by the paintings of Matisse and his colleagues. Writing about two rather traditional pieces of sculpture by Albert Marque, Vauxcelles noted that they were surprising to come upon "au milieu de l'orgie des tons purs: Donatello chez les fauves." 5 The continued use of "Fauve" and "Fauvism" is largely a matter of habit and convenience, as a kind of shorthand for referring to the bright and vigorously brushed paintings that Matisse, Derain, Vlaminck, and a number of other artists made around 1905-1906. Actually, these paintings are rather difficult to characterize as a group, other than to say that they frequently employ saturated hues organized around a polarity of red and green, and that they usually seem to have been done directly from nature, following a practice of direct observation and on-the-spot improvisation. (In fact, the execution of most Fauve paintings was not as spontaneous as it appears to be. What was important was to give the effect of spontaneity, even when a painting was in fact carefully planned and deliberately executed.) What is usually called Fauve painting is more indicative of an attitude than of a specific style, since the stylistic particulars vary quite a bit, not only between the works of different artists but within the work of individuals. But one thing that is characteristic of most Fauve painting is that —unlike Impressionist painting —it clearly attempts to remove its depiction of the natural world from the realm of naturalism. The characteristic fauve color harmony of red and green, for example, is a repudiation of the chromatic harmonies associated with natural light that were used by the Impressionists (yellow/violet, or orange/blue). The Fauves are often said to have created a new kind of light with color; and so they did, but it is an unnatural and aggressive kind of light —which in 1905 was as provocative as the distorted drawing with which it was frequently combined. "Leurs harmonies ne chantent plus," Michel Puy wrote in his 1907 text, "elles rugissent." Such artists, he averred, "ne peuvent laisser personne indifférent; il faut prendre un parti, ou les accepter carrément, ou se détourner d'eux avec horreur." 6 Fauve painting substituted for the world of differentiation between various kinds of objects and textures the notion that the real substance of the painting —that is to say, the ensemble of painted marks that both presents itself as itself and purports to represent something else — unites subject and form in a new entity. This entity, which could be called the depictive entity, simultaneously evokes and transcends the physical objects it depicts. As a result, the subject is literally transformed by its rendering. The objects represented no longer retain their actual textures, reflectivity, or local colors, and their shapes are often severely distorted. We read Fauve paintings as being subjective, but in a very particular way. The depictive entities are in a sense like inner landscapes, projections of the artist's feelings about what he sees. And while they are quite individual, they do not reflect an artist's particular emotions but rather his way of uniting himself to the ideal of universal feeling, to a world that is constantly trembling with energy. This view of reality is close to that described by Jacques Rivière in his 1907 essay on the poetry of Paul Claudel: "Le Monde n'est que mouvement, l'essence de toute chose et de tout être est mouvment; ce que nous appelons matière n'est point la cause ou le lieu du mouvement, mais simplement les 'divers arrangements', les formes que produit le mouvement. L'homme même est une vibration, son esprit un mouvement." 7 Henri Matisse: Japonaise au bord de l'eau, 1905 Oil and pencil on canvas; 35,2 x 28,2 cm The Museum of Modem Art, New York Purchase and partial anonymous gift. 709.1983 Digital image © 2006, The Museum of Modem Art I Scala, Florence © Succession H. Matisse I HUNG ART 2006 The notion of the unified substance of the depictive entity in Fauve painting opened up the possibility of creating new kinds of pictorial metaphors, which were based on the interaction between different parts of the subject matter that were physically distinct from each other, but which could be unified through style. For example, in Matisse's La Japonaise au bord de l'eau of 1905, the woman's body and the landscape are differentiated not through contour but by color, and especially by the way the rhythms of the brush strokes vary as they describe different kinds of things. As a result, we understand the interactions between the woman and the landscape to be reciprocal. Her inner energy radiates into the surrounding landscape at the same time that the surrounding landscape feeds energy back into her. In this painting, Matisse strongly emphasizes how contrasting brush marks and colors can create metaphorical interactions between different orders of things. In an especially striking trope, the swirling forms of water on the woman's Japanese robe are painted in such a way that they become a displaced embodiment of the water that surrounds her. This kind of dynamic interaction between different parts of the picture also informed a good deal of Matisse's later painting, as in Nu bleu, where a very different system of tropes articulates similar kinds of interactions between the woman and the surrounding landscape. Many of these tropes had already been suggested by Cézanne, not only because of the fluidity of the space in his later paintings, but also because of the way that he too was able to make it seem as if objects could
