How Fauvism got its name and what gave rise to it?

How Fauvist art got its name? and where?

Les Fauves is French for The Wild Beasts. Their name goes back to a comment made by art critic Louis Vauxcelles (1870–1943) after visiting the Parisian Salon d’Automne in 1905. There he saw outrageously bold and bright paintings surrounding a Renaissance artwork, to which he sarcastically remarked “Donatello au milieu des fauves!” ( Donatello among the wild beasts!). Clearly, “fauves” was never meant as a word of praise for the artists, nevertheless the label stuck.

What gave rise to Fauvism?

“Les Fauves,” with Henri Matisse (1869-1954) as their main figure, believed that colors should be divorced from physical reality. Matisse summed it up in one line: When I put a green, it is not grass. When I put a blue, it is not the sky. To the Fauves, colors treated independently from their descriptive qualities meant artistic freedom. They believed colors should express the artist’s feelings. As colors lost their traditional purpose, they became the dominant force in the paintings, while shapes were simplified into two-dimensionality.

Their quasi-spiritual treatment of color and its connection to emotion inspired them to experiment further by using color at its highest intensity, particularly red. Certainly, the choice of colors seemed arbitrary and even absurd at times but their movement, which had no theories of manifesto, revolutionized the function of color in Western art. By translating feelings into color, they gave it a non-representational, non-naturalistic role. (Note, the paintings themselves and their subject matter are still figurative and recognizable. We haven’t arrived at abstract art just yet.)