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

"Les jeunes artistes-peintres des écoles extrêmes ont pour but secret de faire de la peinture pure," Apollinaire wrote in Les peintres cubistes. "On a vivement reproché aux artistes-peintres nouveaux des préoccupations géométriques. [...] Mais on peut dire que la géométrie est aux arts plastiques ce que la grammaire est à l'art de l'écrivain." Apollinaire then goes on to speak of "de nouvelles mesures possibles de l'étendue" which the Cubist artists designate "par le terme de quartième dimension." And this, he asserts "figure l'immensité de l'espace s'éternisant dans toutes les directions à un moment déterminé. Elle est l'espace même, la dimension de l'infini; c'est elle qui doue la plasticité les objets. [...] Voulant atteindre aux proportions de l'idéal, ne se bornant pas à l'humanité, les jeunes peintres nous offrent des oeuvres plus cérébrale que sensuelles. Ils s'éloignent de plus en plus de l'ancient art des illusions d'optique et des proportions locales pour exprimer la grandeur des formes métaphysiques. C'est pourquoi l'art actuel, s'il n'est pas l'émanation directe de croyances religieuses déterminées, présente cependant plusieurs caractères du grand art, c'est-àdire de l'Art religieux."

37 This religious overtone was also expressed in terms of the ideas about truth and anonymity that run through so much of the critical writing about Cubism. It is reflected in the myth about Braque's and Picasso's supposedly not being able to tell their Cubist canvases apart, and in the way that the impersonal was constructed as an element of truth. The notion that these canvases are somehow as if anonymous reinforces the idea that they are not subjective views of reality but a profound meditation on "pure reality." 4. Historically, the Fauve moment has been intensely colored by the Cubist revolution that followed it. And although, as we have seen, Fauve painting was originally set against Impressionist practices, by 1912 its association with spontaneity, organic forms, color, light, and direct perception allowed those sympathetic to Cubism to write it off as a prolongation of Impressionism. Or equally bad, as a form of decoration. In fact, after the rise of Cubism, the kind of lyrical painting that Fauvism came to stand for played an increasingly problematical role in the history of modern art. And so, throughout much of the century it has remained

—like perceptual painting in general

—somewhere at the margins of the avant-garde. This very marginalization, however, has paradoxically increased its stature in the art-historical imagination. In a century dominated by geometrical, conceptual, and "dehumanized" art, Fauvism has become a locus for a regretted humanism, a regretted individualism, and a regretted nostalgia for direct contact with nature. This, I think, is why Fauvism has retrospectively come to be such an important element of twentieth century art. It stands for so many aspects of modern art that are supposed to have become passé but that nonetheless continue to exert great presence, and even to suggest a certain future potential. In a curious way, Fauvism it stands both as the founding gesture of the independence of twentieth-century painting from traditional naturalism and as evidence of the potential viability of a new kind of naturalism. Hence, for the various other movements that have been somehow related to it over the course of the century, it has remained the lodestar, the touchstone, the point of reference for individualism, for lyrical painting, for improvisation, for the idea of the primacy of gesture and of "touch." And so it continues to gather a wealth of references, all of them perhaps indirect, but all of them interconnected

— whether they be Kandinsky's painterly abstractions of 1911-1913, or American Abstract Expressionism. Fauve painting has also somehow come to stand for Painting in the face of everything that is Not-painting, so much of which seems to have come, directly or indirectly, out of Cubism. One of the crucial developments around 1910 was the rise of a kind of idealism that discarded the humanistic as superfluous or anti-progressive. This was especially strong in Russia, as witnessed in Malevich's collaboration with Kruchenikh on Victory over the Sun, and in Italy, where the Futurists railed bombastically against the humanistic. But it also persisted in France, less bombastically, but just as firmly. And it was, of course. Cubism that opened the door not only to the great geometric styles that would develop over the course of the century, but also to the art of Duchamp, and to a wide variety of conceptual practices that have called painting itself into question during much of the century.

38 Perhaps this is why Matisse has become so important for us today, in his continued identification with the practice of painting, as well as with the humanistic subject, and with the synthesis of the naturalistic and the conceptual

—in his goal of continuing to combine, as he had during his Fauve years, instinct with intellect. "Ce qui m'intéresse le plus," he wrote in his "Notes d'un peintre," which was published on the eve of the rise of Cubism, "c'est la figure. C'est elle qui me permet le mieux d'exprimer le sentiment pour ainsi dire religieux que je possède de la vie."

39 How different this is from Apollinaire's discussion of the Absolute in Les peintres cubistes, in which the development from Fauvism to Cubism is related to the super-human idea of a truth beyond nature: "La pureté et l'unité ne comptent pas sans la vérité qu'on ne peut comparer à la réalité puisqu'elle est la même, hors de toutes les natures qui s'efforcent de nous retenir dans l'ordre fatal où nous ne sommes que des animaux. Avant tout, les artistes sont des hommes qui veulent devenir inhumains. Ils cherchent péniblement les traces de l'inhumanité, traces que l'on ne rencontre nulle part dans la nature. Elles sont la vérité et en dehors d'elles nous ne connaissons aucune réalité."

40 The currents incipient in Fauvism and Cubism have continued to make themselves felt throughout the century, and the oppositions they embody constitute what is perhaps an unresolvable aspect of modernism generally: as between the claims to the truth of subjectivity and of science; as between secular humanism and a search for absolutes; and as between improvisation and the calculation. It was perhaps the Fauves who made the last strong case for trying to reconcile these polarities and to create an art that was both conceptual, in the sense that the respondents to Morice's "Enquête" intended, and at the same time also rooted in direct visual experience. Even for the painters involved, the Fauve style seems to have been regarded more as a moment of transition than as an end in itself. The question was not how they could sustain the Fauve moment, but what they would do next. Both Matisse and Derain had evolved away from their Fauve styles by 1907, and Braque would shortly follow suit. What they did next, of course, varied greatly. Derain, after a brief en-