Fauvism

In the summer of 1905 Henri Matisse and André Derain painted side by side in Collioure, a fishing port on the Mediterranean. They used unmixed color, often squeezed straight from the tube, in wild, loose dabs, and they stopped asking color to describe what things really looked like.

That autumn they showed the results at the Salon d'Automne in Paris. Matisse's Woman with a Hat, a portrait of his wife Amélie in bold, unnatural color, caused a commotion. The critic Louis Vauxcelles called the painters les fauves, the wild beasts, and the name stuck. The next year Derain took the method to London and painted the Thames in the same bright colors.

The Fauves drew on nineteenth-century color theory: complementary colors placed side by side make each other look brighter. The movement was short. By 1908 most of its painters had moved on, and Georges Braque went on to develop Cubism with Picasso.