Fauves

The exuberant and colourful visual language of the Fauve artists may have been short-lived but it was not an isolated aberration in the evolution of recent western art; it was an emotively dramatic response to the condition of artistic vision at the turn of the century, a condition perhaps best described in the sentiment noted by Herbert Read "take a step back in order to make a better leap forward" (reculer pour mieux sauter).

At the turn of the century the future of western art was indisputedly in the hands of the impressionists and the post-impressionists. Paris was the epicentre, the city to which every aspiring artist gravitated. But the great impressionist and post-impressionist figures were tiring, or dying, or like Gauguin heading off to exile in exotic places.
There was a pause in the momentum.

Into this temporary hiatus poured artists such as Braque and Léger from the provinces, and from further afield Picasso, Brancusi, Kandinsky, Nolde, Boccioni and Modigliani, to join the locals Rouault, Picabia, Derain and Vlaminck.

Little surprise, therefore, that Paris was the catalyst for a dramatic renaissance in artistic vision and for the sheer excitement generated by such an influx of creative energy.

There was a challenger for artistic pre-eminence in Europe at the time as the Bavarian city of Munich, with its strong academic traditions, attracted the German impressionists and then the hugely influential Kandinsky and colleagues like Jawlensky, but its more philosophical spirit mitigated against that city achieving anything like the artistic prominence of Paris. 

Nonetheless one cannot help noticing that the artists in Munich, and the Fauves in Paris and environs, London and Collioure were simultaneously employing colour, pure colour, to express sensation and feeling and doing so in ways that both excited and affronted.

Subsequently the German expressionists in Dresden and Berlin, whilst retaining a firmly figurative tradition, adopted strong and often discordant colours that would have been unthinkable without the precedent set by the Fauves.