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

dont les Daumier, les Gauguin, les Cézanne, les Lautrec, les Van Gogh et les Seurat nous rapprochent."

13 Antoine de La Rochefoucauld went so far as to say that "L'impressionnisme a vécu de la vie instinctive des animaux ou des plantes. Aucun souffle divin ne l'ayant animé, il ne peut se survivre, car l'âme seule est immortelle et cette forme de l'art n'eut point d'âme."

14 Another basic and recurrent idea had to do with the artist being able to force the viewer to change his habitual expectations in order to see the world freshly. In October 1905, shortly after publication of the "Enquête," Morice himself approvingly cited a passage from a lecture which regarded Van Gogh's refusal of opticality as the rejection of a received aesthetic: "Il méprisa nos jouissances optiques, se railla de la médiocrité, de l'indigence de notre vision. [...] Il détruisit notre idéal moyen, l'esthétique consentie."

15 A couple of years later, Michel Puy wrote of the Fauves that they "ont mis une certain rage à présenter des oeuvres qui exigeaient du spectateur la compréhension la plus large de la peinture, et à négliger de s'accommoder aux habitudes des yeux de la multitude."

16 Instead the artist was supposed to be true to his own instincts. As Puy remarked in a later revision of his 1907 essay: "Mais avant de penser à plaire, et surtout à plaire au grand nombre, il faut satisfaire chez soi-même le besoin de saisir une vérité qui se dérobe et qu'on entrevoit au lointain. L'artiste obéit moins au raisonnement qu'aux suggestions de sa propre nature. Il est dirigé par une force intérieure qu'il connaît mal, qu l'égaré souvent, mais qui le ramène toujours dans sa voie."

17 Hand in hand with this idea went the notion of the purely pictorial translation of nature, which was often related to the art of Cézanne. Puy wrote that Matisse was unsatisfied by the art of Monet and instead proposed to his colleagues "une recherche purement pictorale de traduction directe de la nature" that was based on his deep understanding of Cézanne, and which had a determining effect on development of French painting at the time.

18 The idea that painting did not set out to describe the outer world but to comprise a universe of its own was as typical of Fauve painting as it later was of Cubism. Virtually all avant-garde painting at this time was concerned with the idea of the picture asserting its independence from the world it represented, and as containing a pictorial language that to a large degree followed its own syntactical principles. The forms that this took, however, diverged quite a lot between Fauve and Cubist painting. While the Fauves relied on instinct as their guide, and could be seen as sharing with the Impressionists the desire to capture an energy that came from what La Rochefoucauld called "la vie instinctive des animaux ou des plantes," the Cubists would use the notion of the independence of the picture as a way of making a more decisive break with nature. When Apollinaire wrote of Braque's 1908 landscapes that "chaque oeuvre devient un univers nouveau avec ses lois particulières," he was merely giving new emphasis to what had already become an avant-garde truism; but his extreme statement of the case was a response to the extreme form that the paintings themselves had taken.

19 The shift in 1907 and 1908 towards what would be called Cubism coincided with a number of changes in the situation that had existed in 1905. Most important was the new awareness of Cezanne's work that was provoked by the important exhibitions of it in 1906 and 1907— especially the watercolors at Bernheim-Jeune in June 1907, and the large retrospective at the 1907 Salon d'Automne. (In 1905, none of the Fauves except Matisse had had a deep understanding of Cézanne; by 1907 Cezanne's work was becoming broadly appreciated.) Another key factor was the change in the way that Seurat was perceived by the painters and critics who would claim him as a forerunner of Cubism. (The large Seurat retrospective that opened at the Galerie BernheimJeune in December 1908 reinforced his changing position.) In 1905 Matisse and Derain had used Neo-lmpressionist techniques as a point of departure for creating maximum color and light with a fairly minimal attention to the solidity or stability of form. When they began to vary the size and the direction of their brush strokes, they also deconstructed the Neo-lmpressionist syntax and introduced the subversive idea of radical subjectivity. It is important to stress here that we are talking not simply about an actual process, but also about an intention achieved by use of a pictorial rhetoric. Close examination of works that both Matisse and Derain painted during the summer of 1905 reveal that there is often a good deal of preliminary drawing underlying paintings that seem very spontaneous. In at least one case, Matisse's Les toits de Collioure, the preliminary drawing was actually done with a straight-edge, even though the painting itself gives a strong impression of having been painted spontaneously. This kind of contradiction is fairly typical of the kinds of claims made by modern painting generally

—probably because as subject matter became less important, the various aspects of formal structure had to carry increasing weight. Certain stylistic characteristics came to assume symbolic and ideologic value as "visual markers," even though those markers were sometimes quite arbitrary. A brush stroke in an Impressionist painting, for example, is supposed to reflect spontaneity, even though we now know that the Impressionists' paintings were often not executed spontaneously. Rather, the brush strokes in Impressionist paintings enact or perform spontaneity as part of what we might call their rhetoric of representation. In a similar way, the brush strokes in Seurat's paintings were held to enact scientific objectivity, even though we now know that they had a very tenuous relationship to the scientific thinking on which they were supposed to be based.

20 In Fauve painting the spontaneity evident in the bold brushwork was embraced as giving testimony to authenticity

—and in this respect the aesthetics of Fauve painting were still related to Impressionism. For the Fauves, personal authenticity was set forth as a strong claim to truth that was the antithesis of the scientific claim to truth. (During the summer of 1905, Derain expressed his own inner conflict between painting "un monde qui se détruit de lui-même quand on le pousse à l'absolu," and his desire to convey a deep sense of humanity within his formal structures.)

21 Such an approach maintains that the inner truth of an enlightened individual is greater than any supposedly objective truth that could be claimed by science. That was one of the strongest implicit claims of Fauve painting generally, and it is that claim that would be most strongly challenged by the Cubists and their supporters as they reevaluated the significance of Seurat and Cézanne. The Seurat of the Cubists was no longer the inventor of "chromo-luminarisme," as he had been for the Fauves in 1904 and 1905, but rather the artist whom André Salmon called "le reconstructeur," and whose more austere late works, such as Le chahut, were hung in the Cubists' studios. Salmon conceived of Seurat's contribution almost entirely in non-chromatic terms, emphasizing instead the way that Seurat