Fauvism is a French Avant-guard art movement started by a group of loosely associated early 20th-century modern artists who sought to bring personal expression into their paintings.  Works emphasized strong colour and the artists’ own emotion and expression over the representational or realistic values retained by Impressionism artists.  Founders of this movement were Henri Matisse and André Derain.

Fauve is French for ‘wild beasts,’ a name which stuck among the critics who viewed their work (Les Fauves). Fauvism was inspired by Post-Impressionism, a 19th-century movement back toward form in painting, and away from the optical realism created by Impressionism. It was Fauvism that led the charge toward well-known 20th-century painting styles, such as Cubism and Expressionism

One of the greatest inspirations for the Fauvists was the Post-Impressionist artist Paul Gauguin (1848-1903) who believed colour could be used to translate emotions beyond words and into objects in paintings.  Other influences on Fauvism include Post-Impressionist artists Vincent van Gogh and Paul Cézanne.

“Imagine trees that don’t have to be green and brown, people who are blue and green, and red skies in paintings.” All of these ideas, which express the feelings of the artist through a somewhat irrational use of color, create the Fauvist style.

The principles of Fauvism include:

• A radical use of unnatural colours that separated colour from its usual representational and realistic role, giving new, emotional meaning to the colours
• Creating a strong, unified work that appears flat on the canvas
• Showing the individual expressions and emotions of the painter instead of creating paintings based on theories of what paintings should look like with objects represented as they appear in nature
• Bold brush strokes using paint straight from the tube instead of preparing and mixing it