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

gagement with Cézannism and a form of proto-Cubism, became a kind of realist, closer to Courbet than to Cézanne. Braque, along with Picasso, pioneered the most radical form of Cubism. And Matisse, unquestionably the strongest of the Fauve painters, but also the perpetual odd man out, was alone among the Fauves in remaining directly concerned with "le dynamisme universel" and "les modifications que s'infligent réciproquement des objets crus inamimés," which Gleizes and Metzinger appropriated as being the exclusive domain of Cubism. Matisse's effort to fuse the lyrical with the metaphysical, and yet to avoid conventionalized styles, resulted in an art marked by the greatest stylistic diversity. So much so that Salmon referred to him as "le plus incohérent des artistes modernes."

41 It is perhaps telling that this supposed "incoherence," which so clearly echoes the kinds of accusations made against the Fauves in 1905, ended up creating one of the richest and most influential bodies of work in modern art. For us today, following the the end of a century in which various kinds of programmatic idealism have brought on incalculable disasters, the unsystematic and humanistic nature of Fauve painting offers much to ponder. Notes Another version of this essay was first published as "Le fauvisme, le cubisme et la modernité de la peinture moderne", in: Le fauvisme ou "l'épreuve du feu": Éruption de la modernité en Europe, Paris, Musée d'Art Moderne de la Ville de Paris/Paris-Musées, 1999. 1 Michel Puy, "Les Fauves", La Phalange, 15 November 1907; reprinted in Dagen 1994, 143-151. The other artists mentioned were Matisse, Derain, Girieud, Vlaminck, Friesz, Duty, Camoin, and Manguin. 2 Daniel-Henry Kahnweiler, "La montée du cubisme" (written in 1915, first published in 1920) in: Confessions esthétiques, Paris, Gallimard, 1963, 19. 3 See Louis Vauxcelles, "Le Salon d'Automne", special supplement to Gil Bias, 17 October 1905. Contrary to common belief, the name did not catch on right away. It was not until almost two years later, in Vauxcelles's review of the 1907 Salon des Indépendants, that the epithet "Fauve" was used in a direct way to describe Matisse and his colleagues: "Les Fauves!... M. Matisse, fauve-chef; M. Derain, fauve-sous-chef; MM. Othon Friesz et Dufy, fauves à la suite; M. Girieud, fauve indécis" (Louis Vauxcelles, "Le Salon des Indépendants", Gil Blas, 20 March 1907.) The term came into common use in 1907, but by then the painters associated with it were working in a markedly different manner and were pursuing somewhat different goals. 4 Puy, op. cit. (Note 1), 144. Puy was also referring to the subversive, anti-rationalist artists of the "Arts incohérents" group, who exhibited together between 1882 and 1889. Groups with extreme, anti-social names such as Hydropathes, Hirsutes, Zutistes, and Jemenfoutistes had been organized in Paris cabarets since the 1880s, so the invention of an appellation such as "Fauve" had its roots in an already established fin de siècle Parisian subculture. See Daniel Grojnowski, "Une avant-garde sans avancée; les 'arts incohérents' 1882-1889", Actes de la Récherche en Sciences Sociales, 40, November 1981, 73-86. 5 Vauxcelles, "Le Salon d'Automne", op. cit. (Note 3) 6 Puy, op. cit. (Note 1), 144. In a revised version of his essay published in L'Effort des peintres modernes (Paris, Albert Messein, 1933, 62), Puy stated this in somewhat rougher language: "leurs harmonies ne chantent plus, elles rugissent; elles ne vous caressent pas, elles vous sautent à la gorge." 7 Jacques Rivière, Etudes, Paris, Editions de la Nouvelle Revue Française, 1911, 89. 8 See Charles Morice, "Enquête sur les tendances actuelles des arts plastiques", Mercure de France, LVI-LVII, (1 and 15 August 1905, 1 September 1905), 346-359, 538-555, 61-85. Morice asked the following five questions: "(1) Avez-vous le sentiment qu'aujourd'hui l'art tende à prendre des directions nouvelles? (2) L'impressionnisme est-il fini? Peut-il se renouveler? (3) Whistler, Gauguin, Fantin-Latour... qu'emportent ces morts? Que nous laissent-ils? (4) Quel état faites-vous de Cézanne? (5) Selon vous l'artiste, doit-il tout attendre de la nature ou seulement lui demander les moyens plastiques de réaliser la pensée qui est en lui?" Among the respondents were Charles Camoin, Georges Desvallières, Kees Van Dongen, Raoul Dufy, Pierre Girieud, René Piot, Jean Puy, Georges Rouault, and Paul Signac; but not Derain, Matisse, or Vlaminck. Since Matisse apparently attended at least one of Morice's "Dîners du 14" that spring, he may have been sent a questionnaire; but no response is recorded; see Paul Deisemme, Un Théoricien du Symbolisme: Charles Morice, Paris, Librarie Nizet, 1958, 94. 9

Morice, "Enquête", op. cit. (Note 8), 346. 10 Ibid., 347. 11 Ibid., 538. 12 Ibid., 352. 13 Ibid. 14

Ibid., 541. 15 Charles Morice, "Art Moderne", Mercure de France, 1 October 1905, 443-444. Morice was citing a lecture about Van Gogh that M.A. van Bever had given at the 1905 Salon des Indépendants. 16 Puy, op. cit. (Note 1), 149. 17 Puy, 1933, op. cit. (Note 6) 66-67. 18 Puy, op. cit. (Note 1), 146. 19 Guillaume Apollinaire, Préface au Catalogue de L'Exposition Braque, 9-28 November 1908, at the Galerie Kahnweiler; as reprinted in Apollinaire, Chroniques d'Art (1902-1918), ed. L.-C. Breunig, Paris, Gallimard, 1960, 61. 20See for example, Robert Herbert, "Introduction", in: Seurat, Paris, Réunion des Musées Nationaux, 1991, especially 22-25. 21 Letters to Vlaminck, 28 July and 5 August 1905; in: André Derain, Lettres à Vlaminck, ed. Phillipe Dagen, Paris, Flammarion, 1994, 161-162, 165-166. 22 André Salmon, "La Revelation de Seurat", in: Propos d'Atelier, Paris, Crès, 1922, 42-48. Delaunay, who valued Seurat for his use of color and light, was one of the few exceptions to this tendency among the Cubists and their supporters. 23 See Apollinaire's comments in his reviews of 23 December 1910 and 28 January 1911, in: Chroniques d'Art, op. cit. (Note 19), 135, 144. 24 André Lhote, Georges Seurat, Paris, 1922, as cited in Henri Dorra and John Rewald, Seurat, Paris, Les BeauxArts, 1959, 279. 25 See André Lhote, Treatise on Landscape Painting, London, Zwemmer, 1930, 34. 26 Paul Signac, D'Eugène Delacroix au néo-impressionnisme (1899), reprint edition, introduced by Françoise Cachin, Paris, Herman, 1978, 117-1 18. 27 Jean Moréas, "Le Symbolisme", Le Figaro, September 1886; reprinted in Bonner Mitchell, Les Manifestes Littéraires de la Belle Époque, 1886-1914. Anthologie critique, Paris, Editions Seghers, 1966, 29. 28Charles Morice, "Les Aquarelles de Cézanne", Mercure de France, 1 July 1907, 134. 29 Charles Morice, "La Vingt cinquième Exposition des Indépendants", Mercure de France, 16 April 1909, 729. In Vauxcelles's review of Braque's 1908 exhibition at Kahnweiler (Gil Blas, 14 November 1908), which is usually credited with the invention of the term "cubisme," Vauxcelles had written : "Il construit des bonshommes métalliques et déformés qui sont d'une simplification terrible. Il méprise la forme, réduit tout, sites et figures et maisons, à des schémas géométrique à des cubes." But Vauxcelles' use of the word "cubes" is merely descriptive of the forms in those particular paintings and does not imply an "isme." 30See Morice, "Enquête", op. cit. (Note 8), 352. 31 Exactly what was said by whom, and in exactly what context, has been widely discussed. See for example, Judith Cousins, "Chronology", in: William Rubin, Picasso and Braque: Pioneering Cubism, New York, The Museum of Modern Art, 1989, especially 435-436, note 62. 32 Braque later said of Cezanne's effect on him at L'Estaque: "Ce fut plus qu'une influence, une initiation." Jacques Lassaigne, "Entretien avec Georges Braque", in: XXe Siècle, 41, 1973, 3. 33 Albert Gleizes and Jean Metzinger, Du "Cubisme" (1912) reprint edition, Paris, Editions Présence, 1980, 41-42. Immediately following this, Gleizes and Metzinger discount Fauve painting, which they refer to as "la décoration picturale," and which they lament by exclaiming "assez de confusions et d'équivoques!" and associating it with "un artifice bon à cacher une impuissance" (43-44). 34 Morice, Mercure de France, 16 December 1908, 736-737. 35 Arthur Jerome Eddy: Cubists and Post-Impressionism, Chicago, A.C. McClurg & Co., 1914, 73. A similar view was expressed in the 18 November 1911 issue of the New York publication Literary Digest: "The cubists take the blocks of the pavement as their medium for interpreting the external world" (Oxford English Dictionary, Second edition). 36See, for example, Salmon, "Histoire Anecdotique du Cubisme", in: La jeune peinture française, Paris, Albert Messein, 1912, 53. 37 Guillaume Apollinaire, Les peintres cubistes, Paris, 1913, 60-63. I have, of course, greatly abbreviated Apollinaire's argument; but I do not believe that I have distorted it. 38 It is perhaps no mere coincidence that the paradigm of the crystalline set forth in Cubist painting has direct correspondences to a curious physical phenomenon: the crystal itself, which seems organic but grows, and whose atoms follow rigid structural laws. The perfect crystal, it might be added, is the cube

—as in the salt crystal, whose atoms are all set at 90 degrees to each other. That is perhaps why salt was so significant for an artist such as Robert Smithson, who would later use the image of the crystalline as a quintessential opposition to the human. In Smithson's writings, he posits the notion of the "crystalline" in direct contrast to the humanistic and organic, as a glacial and impersonal concept that disdains viewing existence from a single portion of time and space, and which evokes the farthest reaches of space and the most remote and incomprehensible notions of time. 39 Matisse 1908, 741. 40 Apollinaire, Les peintres cubistes, op. cit. (Note 37) 57. 41 André Salmon, "Les Fauves", in La jeune peinture française, op. cit. (Note 36) 19.