Culture

According to Deborah Nicholls-Lee, the “Wild Beasts”

wiliam

September 13, 2023
2 min read
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According to Deborah Nicholls-Lee, the “Wild Beasts” art movement had an issue with women in more ways than one.

Although Amélie Matisse almost always wore black, her garment in Woman with a Hat (1905) is an ambiguous tone due to the chaotic array of colors in the painting. She use to be brunette, but now her hair is paint a flaming red color with a green forehead and nose.

Deborah Nicholls-Lee

At the Salon d’Automne of 1905, works like this one, with its raucous, unnaturalistic colors and childlike flattened forms, turned the snobby Paris art establishment on its head. The moniker “Fauves” (wild animals) persisted.

Fauvism’s unbridled art liberated color from its singularly descriptive, imitative role, building on the work of Paul Cézanne and Vincent van Gogh. Now that color was expressing emotion, its defined planes paved the way for cubism’s shattered geometry and the emergence of abstract art.

Even though the Fauves’ groundbreaking use of color is highlight in Vertigo of Colour: Matisse, Derain, and the Origins of Fauvism, which opens on October 13 at the New York Met, and in Matisse by Matisse, the largest-ever exhibition of the artist, which will first be on display in Beijing (until October 15) and then Shanghai, Fauvism is once again in the spotlight this fall.

Nevertheless, art history hasn’t always seen the whole picture despite this fervor for Fauvism.To remedy this, Matisse, Derain and Friends: The Paris Avantgarde 1904–1908 debuted at the Kunstmuseum Basel on September 2. It is to the first gallery to examine the widely underappreciate contribution of women to the movement.

The most common misconception about women in the Fauvist movement is that there weren’t any, says Arthur Fink, co-curator of the show, to Culture. He cites Marie Laurencin, who was overlook by art history but paint by Henri Rousseau and “clearly part of the aesthetic discourses of the time,” as well as Émilie Charmy, who was so much more than Charles Camoin’s muse but whose work “people just actively ignore.” Alice Bailly, Suzanne Valadon, Sonia Delaunay, Gabriele Münter, and Marianne Von Werefkin are more names to consider. Who? Quite.