Fauvism, Expressionism, and Cubism

Fauvism was the first great avant-garde movement of the twentieth century, launched publicly at the 1905 Salon d'Automne in Paris, where a room of canvases by Henri Matisse, André Derain, and Maurice de Vlaminck struck the critic Louis Vauxcelles as the work of "fauves", or wild beasts, because of their violently non-naturalistic color. Matisse, the movement's central figure, abandoned the descriptive function of color altogether: skies could be red, faces green, and a woman's hat could burst with unmixed pigment straight from the tube, as in Woman with a Hat (1905) and the ambitious pastoral scene The Joy of Life (1905 to 1906). Fauvism was short-lived as an organized group, largely dissolving by around 1908 as its members moved toward Cubism or other directions, but its liberation of color from representation opened a path that later abstract painting would follow.