Les Fauvres, the Wild Beasts, was the name an art critic gave to a group of painters after seeing their work hanging at the Paris Salon d’Automne of 1905. Henri Matisse was the head of the group. “The image of untamed animals shows how aggressive these paintings appeared to an audience which was only coming to terms with Impressionism,” explained Janez Langus, a student of art, as we looked at the colourful paintings of Matisse, that lit up the café walls, in the James Callahan University building. The world was used to realistic paintings, but critics were already looking at Matisse's colourful ‘Fauves’ with appreciative eyes.

Colour is what hits you when you first view Matisse. His work is a celebration of colour and not necessarily like how nature portrays it. And besides the brightness of his art, the feeling one gets looking at, say, his, La Musique, or his, Les Poissons Rouge, is his avante garde brush. There is no delicacy of finish in his plump women and rather ugly nudes, but then that is debatable. Matisse was the first artist to voice that a painting is the canvas and the pigments. That is why, the idea of fauvism, as a picture, is the sum of the marks made on the canvas, rather than a mirror held up to life, or to nature, or to literature.

Born in 1869, in a little town called Bohain, Matisse came into the art world, quite late in life. It was after he was ill and was given a paint-box to keep him busy during his long convalescence, that he really began to paint. “When I start to paint, I felt transported to a kind of paradise,” he said, “starting to paint, I felt free, quiet and alone.”

Matisse was passionately convinced that his new style of art should find a public. Slowly by 1908, any avante garde painting was called ‘Fauve’. Matisse bravely called his art, ‘the courage to return to the purity of the means.’ What Matisse meant was the use of the whole palette of colour, stuff to stir the sensual depths of man.’
Fauvism was not a school of painting like Cubism, but was just a restless search for style by Matisse. Check out his stunning View of Collioure painted in 1905. It breathes colour, remote from any conventional code for the colours of nature. This was one of the imaginative leaps of modern art which was not arbitrary, but directed with a positive purpose. This odd and unusual colour scheme is what made Matisse and Fauvism different. Slowly his art began to revolve around red and green. In fact, all his art painted in 1905 were pictures of red and green and these pictures escaped from the naturalism of fixed colours, for fixed objects.

Matisse married in 1898 and that was when he set out on his travels. He was guided by an old artist named Pissario, who suggested he visit London and see the work of landscape artist Turner and also introduced Matisse to the art of Cezanne. It was from Turner that Matisse learnt the concepts of colour and light. It was then around his 30th birthday that he decided to reject all restraint and his work became impetuous and free. “Growing within me, I felt the passion of colour,” he said. So broadly speaking, Fauvism followed Matisse. It moved at a strapping pace, with sudden bursts of energy, rather than a steady growth of a style. That is why Fauvism had the shortest life of any 20th century movement. So maybe, one could say Fauvism was the result of assimilating the richness and the variety of Impressionism and post Impressionism.

It was in 1903 that Matisse had to face the unpleasant fact that all his experimentation did not bring in enough money for him to live. He had three children and his wife tried to earn through a millinery shop that failed. In fact, in 1903, like many artists of his time, Matisse felt he had to abandon painting and get a proper job. “I have to keep a calm and smiling face to the crowd of art-lovers who do not care for tormented artists,” he told his friend Manguin in a letter, showing the extent of his anxiety at his lack of funds.

The Fauvism of Matisse, was in essence not to paint an object, but to paint the effect it produces. So after his discovery in 1905 of this style, his art in later practice, moved in that direction – seeking light through the opposition of colours. This is what Matisse called the abandonment of imitative colour and he showed what could be done with red and green. The painting of his wife, ‘The Green Stripe’, is famous for this juxtaposition of colours and his physical involvement with colours, like a sculptor’s physical involvement with his clay. The ridge of green paint running down the centre of her face gives out such a strong effect, that from a distance it looks as though it is moulded into shape with the fingers, rather than painted on with a brush. The impact on the image as a whole is made all the more direct by his flatter use of colour and the sparing evidence left by the brush mark.

Colours that convey the radiance of broad day light were central to Matisse’s desire, that his art should act as a balm to the human spirit. So if Matisses’ Fauvism can boast of one single achievement, it is the achievement of making painting do ‘something that only painting can do’.