Stroking Those Wild Beasts

By ROBERT HUGHES

What's in a name? Not much, the historian of art is bound to answer. Cubism was not about cubes, nor Fauvism about wild beasts. When in 1905 an affable critic looked round the Paris Salon d'Automne, which contained an Italianate bust surrounded by the paintings of Henri Matisse and his disciples, he made a wisecrack about "Donatella chez les fauves" (Donatello among the wild beasts), thus giving a short-lived movement a very durable and misleading label. Fauvism was worked out by a small group of artists over a span of three years; it was dead by 1907. It could coarsely be defined as what Matisse and France's Midi region did to half a dozen painters: to Maurice de Vlaminck and Andre Derain, to Raoul Dufy and Georges Braque, to Kees van Dongen and Henri Manguin.

Raw Sensation. The textbook characteristics of Fauvism are familiar enough: the bright, dissonant color, the crude urgency of surface, the distorted drawing and the love of brisk, apparently raw sensation. But there was no unifying doctrine, as with surrealism, nor even a strong common practice, such as the cubists found. "One can talk about the impressionist school," the Dutchman Van Dongen later remarked, "because they held certain principles. For us there was nothing like that; we merely thought their colors were a bit dull."

Nevertheless, Fauvism (much helped by its name) is conventionally taken as the first modern art movement--"modern" because scandalous to the bourgeois of 1905. Its explosive nature has been much strummed upon, but we do not see enough of the paintings themselves. How do they look now, 70 years later? A splendid exhibition at New York's Museum of Modern Art, sponsored by SCM Corporation and the National Endowment for the Arts, supplies the means to an answer. The museum's curator of painting and sculpture, John Elderfield, has assembled 114 works by 22 artists under the title "The 'Wild Beasts': Fauvism and Its Affinities." The title is presumably ironic, since the last impression the MOMA wants to give is that Fauve painting might keep so much as an erg of its old offensive power. "To look again at these exquisitely decorative paintings," writes Elderfield in his admirable catalogue essay, "is to realize that the term Fauvism tells us hardly anything at all about the ambitions or concepts that inform Fauvist art. 'Wild Beasts' seems the most unlikely of descriptions for these artists."

Those who still cling to a belief in the "revolutionary" powers of art will no doubt be irritated, but the appropriateness of Elderfield's approach is borne out by the very first room of the show, which holds two celebrated and once controversial Fauve paintings: Matisse's Luxe, calme et volupte, of 1904-05, and

Derain's The Turning Road, L'Estaque, 1906. Luxe is a clumsily tender Arcadi an idyl, the Isle of Cythera transferred to an as yet unpopular St.-Tropez, spatted with dots of neo-impressionist light. The painting is drenched in idealized wistfulness, even to the title, taken from Baudelaire's L 'Invitation au voyage: "There, all is order and beauty/Luxury, calm and sensuous pleasure." No effort can restore its lost shock value, and this, in a different way, is true of the Derain as well. Today we luxuriate in its weighty design and audacious color, the blaring vermilion tree trunks, the complex blues in the caves of shadow, the pyrotechnics of green and yellow in the foliage. One moves into the work without strain; it is not an Arcadia, but a place well removed from the realities of industrial and urban Europe.

Tricolors and Parasols. This sim ple optimism, underlying the aggressive color, is the main difference between Fauvism and expressionism. Every where one turns in this show, pleasure is celebrated: the tricolores and red, white and blue parasols in Raoul Dufy's street scenes, the rosy theatrical vigor of Van Dongen's scene of a couple out side a brothel. The Hussar (Liverpool Night House), 1906, the slapdash but infectious ebullience of Vlaminck's still lifes. The best sight of all, though, is Matisse inventing the Mediterranean; it is amazing to find how deeply one's images of that coast have been marked by Matisse's agaves and olives, his lion-colored headlands and glimpses of pink water and red masts beyond a balcony.

The liberation of color achieved by the Fauves was of large but finite consequence: Fauvism was not a style that could be developed. The phlegmatic Georges Braque observed, "You can't remain forever in a state of paroxysm."

Soon the swollen contours and lush col ors of paintings like Braque's Still Life with Pitchers, 1906, would give way to the austerities of cubism. The demands of more legible structure and more com plicated feeling drew Matisse away from the style he had largely invented. As Elderfield notes in the catalogue, "Matisse's ideal voluptuous world only fully emerged when Fauvism had ended, and could only be created by renouncing that part of it he felt to be excessive."

After 1908 Derain pruned his color to achieve more weighty and old-masterly effects, and was never to regain the same energy. Vlaminck plummeted into coarse self-parody, Dufy tended more and more to crank out pretty little furniture-pictures, and Van Dongen simply fell apart, becoming--in his meaningless virtuosity and appeal to cafe society--an Andy Warhol with red corpuscles. The brief moment of Fauvism was over; naturally, since it was synonymous with youth itself.

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