Expressionism / Fauvism

At the 1905 Salon d'Automne in Paris, a critic looked at the canvases of Matisse, Derain, Vlaminck and their circle — painted in screeching, unmodulated colour with no pretence of naturalism — and called them "les fauves": wild beasts. Fauvism lasted only a few years as a cohesive movement, but its liberation of colour from descriptive obligation was permanent. In Germany, roughly simultaneously, the painters of Die Brücke (Kirchner, Schmidt-Rottluff, Heckel, founded in Dresden in 1905) and later Der Blaue Reiter (Kandinsky, Marc, Macke, in Munich from 1911) were developing a parallel and in some ways darker answer to the same question: if colour and form could be distorted, exaggerated and freed from imitation, what could they express? German Expressionism found its answer in anxiety, urban alienation and spiritual longing rather than the Mediterranean joy of early Fauvism. Between the two tendencies, the basic grammar of twentieth-century painting was established.

How to recognise it

Colour used non-naturalistically is the first and loudest signal: red shadows, orange sky, green faces — colour chosen for emotional rather than optical truth. In Fauvist work, the palette is often bright and joyful, applied in bold flat strokes with visible pleasure in paint's physicality. In Expressionist work, especially German, colour tends to be harsher, more strident — acid yellows, smouldering reds, deep acid greens — and figures are often distorted or angular. Both share an emphatic visible brushstroke and a tendency to simplify or eliminate perspective. Kirchner's Berlin street scenes have a distinctly neurotic energy; Matisse's *La Danse* (1910) a liberating rhythmic one. If colour seems to be shouting rather than describing, the painting belongs in this group.