Fauvism

Fauvism and the 20th Century thoughts

Fauvism is the first 20th Century pictorial movement . I think, it introduces the spirit of the new era. It doesn’t only starts a new way of expressing but also a new way of thinking and viewing reality.

No more “cold”, external “reality”, no more just empty lines and shapes. What each person sees is so hard to describe and so particular that is not possible anymore to express conventionally. I mean, we can’t, for example, agree that the sun in a specific situation, is just yellow, others may think it should be red or orange, or any other colour that expresses our particular and unique view.

Fauvist painters decided to express their feelings towards reality and their subjective view of the world. Matisse is its main figure. He wrote in his “Notes of a painter”:

“There are two ways of expressing things; one is to show them crudely, the other is to evoke them through art.” Matisse

The 20^th century people don’t feel delighted by the exact representation of a landscape or a human body. The advances in technology made possible the photograph which catches the exact shape of things. Art needs to show the truth behind that “apparently real image”. It needs to express the most important aspect of reality: the soul, the feelings and thoughts which make the singularity, the unrepeatable of every human being appear. Matisse narrated about one of his paintings:

“…I looked at it, and then a feeling came over me that it was not I, that it did not express me or express what I feel."Matisse

Fauvism developed through 1905-1908 but its representatives lived during the most terrible wars of the century. Deep and strong emotions needed to be expressed. The sensibility of the moment changed. Many feelings needed to come out and they couldn’t be represented by the traditional ways, which showed a perfect image of the world: a perfect body, a perfect natural order.

It is also true that the advance in technology was so huge that it developed at high speed. The value of art changed so. The photograph, the television then, new artistic materials close to more people, the movies, etc. all these advances and surely a lot of more, gave innumerable new ways of creating and expressing. The fauves started using colour as the main means to express but lately, different artists of other movements will use unconceivable materials as newspapers, plastic objects or whatever was needed to express these new feelings.

Fauvism starts revealing a new way of thinking. It starts making conscious about that new reality of the human being. This new human being that now cares about different issues which need to find a way of expressing in accordance with it. The world will provide with the new materials, feelings and thoughts.

Work by Bellingerri, Paulenko and Destefani