How These Moden Artists Ignited a Colour Revolution
The “wild” painters of Paris who kick-started 20th-century art
“I did not want to follow a conventional way of painting,” recounted the artist Maurice de Vlaminck. “I felt a tremendous urge to re-create a new world seen through my own eyes, a world which was entirely mine.”
With these words, Vlaminck echoed a whole generation of Paris-based painters who were determined to revolutionise visual art with personal visions rendered in bright, unruly colours and textures.
Vlaminck, along with Henri Matisse and André Derain, were pivotal members of a group of early 20th-century artists who developed a painting style that one art critic derogatorily labelled fauves or “wild beasts”.
This label, however, became synonymous with the group, solidifying their name — and even reputation — as Les Fauves.
And whilst the Fauvist movement possessed no definitive doctrine, the paintings and writings of its members reveal a shared belief in the expressive potential of art, bonding them together in a brief yet intense association that became a cornerstone in the story of modern art.
