1. Marie Laurencin, Diane à la chasse, 1908, Huile sur bois, 20,3 x 28,2 cm, Musée Marie Laurencin, Tokyo, © Estate of the artist
The wild beasts are up and coming in Basel
The Kunstmuseum Basel present until the end of January 2024 the exhibition "Matisse, Derain and Friends - The Paris Avantgarde 1904–1908", which is one of the last exhibitions the current director of the house has been the curator, but also one of the first project he started five years ago.
When you think about the connection between the "Fauve" and the collection of the house, there is not a lot of connection. But due to numerous artworks on deposit to the museum and the first exhibition dedicated to the history of Cubism a few years ago, it was fair to produce another round of exhibition dedicated to an overlooked art movement, which is not really collected in Swiss institutions.
While the exhibition focus on the works produced by European artists between 1904 and 1908, by Henri Matisse, André Derain, Maurice de Vlaminck, Georges Braque, and their friends, it also focus on the roles of gallerists and female artists and models, as a mean of expression, inspiration and sometimes, prostitution.
The history of the movement
2. André Derain, Le Port de Collioure, 1905, Oil on paper laid on canvas, 47 x 56 cm, Staatsgalerie Stuttgart, erworben mit Lotto-Mitteln 1966, Bpk - Staatsgalerie Stuttgart, © 2023, ProLitteris, Zurich
Just before the First World War, and as a new century full of evolution arrived, fauvism was one of the first avant-garde movement that flourished in France, due to a group of artists coming from different background and school, in Paris or in the countryside.
But, the "Wild Beasts" or "Les Fauves" was widely displayed and criticised during the autumn Salon exhibition in Paris in 1905. At the time, the art critic Louis Vauxcelles wrote a review of the Autumn Salon exhibition in Paris in 1905, and after looking at the works of Matisse and Derain, the critic said "Donatello chez les fauves" (Donatello among wild beasts).
During this salon, Derain and Matisse introduced to the public their creative inventions made together in the small fishing port of Collioure on the Mediterranean coast. During the summer of 1905, Derain joined the family of Matisse in this small town to break the rules of the impressionist painter and to create pictures with bold colours, undisguised brushstrokes and vibrant colors coming directly from the tube.
At first, Matisse was inspired by the Post-Impressionist styles of Van Gogh, Gauguin, and Cézanne, and the Neo-Impressionism of Seurat, Cross, and Signac, but after numerous experimentations with Signac, he shifted his style to create a new picture space defined by the movement of color planes.
Soon after, a group of artists joined André Derain and Henri Matisse such as Kees van Dongen, Charles Camoin, Henri-Charles Manguin, Othon Friesz, Jean Puy, Louis Valtat, Georges Rouault, Georges Braque and Raoul Dufy.
The different sections of the exhibition
3. (from left right) Maurice de Vlaminck, Restaurant de la Machine à Bougival, 1905, Oil on canvas, 60 x 81,5cm, Musée D'Orsay, Paris, © 2023 ProLitteris, Zurich and Gina Folly.
Maurice de Vlaminck, Sous-bois, 1905, Oil on canvas, 60 x 72 cm, Private Collection, © 2023 ProLitteris, Zurich and Gina Folly.
André Derain, Autoportrait à la casquette, 1905, Oil on canvasn 33 x 25,5 cm, Private Collection, © 2023 ProLitteris, Zurich and Gina Folly.
Maurice de Vlaminck, André Derain, 1906, Oil on canvas, 27 x 22,2 cm, The Metropolitan Museum of Art, Jacques and Natasha Gelman Collection, 1998 (1999.363.83), © 2023 ProLitteris, Zurich and Gina Folly.
R1 - The start of the exhibition is titled "The students of Moreau", because all of the early fauvist came from the École des Beaux-Arts in Paris and the class of Gustave Moreau. Thus, a group of friends consisting of Henri Matisse, Albert Marquet, Charles Camoin, Jean Puy, and Henri Manguin bonded together to create works after the model. With those early works, they experimented with the use of dots of colors, hues, the representation of the human body, etc.
R2 - The second room of the exhibition is dedicated to two cities in which fauvism was born, Chatou and Collioure. First of all, Chatou, where André Derain and Maurice de Vlaminck rented a studio together to create works and being surrounded by the countryside. Between 1901 and 1904, Derain and Vlaminck stayed in contact even tho Derain served in the military.
In the winter of 1904, Matisse visited the two artists in Chatou and realized that they were creating the same kind of pictures, with the same bold colours and brushstrokes.
In the summer of 1905, and on Signac’s recommendation, Matisse traveled with his family to the French fishing village of Collioure near the Spanish border. Derain joined the family of Matisse in this small town to break the rules of the impressionist painter and to create pictures with bold colours, undisguised brushstrokes and vibrant colors coming directly from the tube.
R3 - Beside the south of France, Fauvism was also present in Normandy. After the Salon in 1905, Georges Braque, Raoul Dufy and Othon Friesz, sought to be close to the Fauves due to their style and their use of colors. During their trips to Paris and the south of France, they we're looking at impressionist artists in Normandy, and in Paris, and to the South of France, in l’Estaque, a village near Marseille closely associated with Paul Cezanne.
R4 - The fourth room of the exhibition focus on still life and on family scenes, to do so, you need a model. To create a still-life, it's quite easy, but to find a model for a whole group of artists, it's quite complex, thus Amélie Matisse-Parayre often modeled for the group, she was also the one who gained enough money to let his husband create pictures, which as the time, was quite complex to sell.
R5 - The fifth room is dedicated to the figure of Berthe Weill, who opened her own art gallery in Paris in 1901 and one of the first female gallerist. One of her first exhibition was dedicated to the works of Matisse and Marquet, thus being one of the first gallery to support their works. Beside male artists, she also promoted female artists such as Émilie Charmy and Marie Laurencin, who became quite close to the fauvist.
R6 - The next room is dedicated to the depiction of the city and the night life. At the time many of the fauvist had ateliers and studios in Montmartre, thus, they were at the center of Parisian nightlife and prostitution. Thus, the group painted numerous portraits of sex workers, singers, and dancers, and they also depict the asymmetrical relations and to the sexualized perspective on the female body.
On the meantime, Derain was asked by his gallerist Ambroise Vollard to travel to London to paint cityscapes, like Monet did a few years before with the Durand-Ruel. Although Derain’s paintings are based on urban life and the banks of the Thames, they have a vivid coloration.
R7 - In the tradition of the "Pastoral", which is the depiction of idealized landscapes made by Claude Lorrain, Nicolas Poussin, and Paul Cezanne, the artists created symbolically charged depiction of the city life. To do so, they blended various iconographic references, from anarchistic pictures, to medieval legends and Cambodian temple friezes.
R8 - The fauves we're known for their paintings, but they also created works on paper, ceramics and sculptures, they experimented with a series of hand-sized sculptures made between 1904 and 1909, printmaking, watercolours, ceramics, vases, plates and thus changed what an artist should produce and change their immediate living environment.
R9 - The last room of the exhibition show how Fauvism played a central role in the international development of modern art in Europe, when at the same time Wassily Kandinsky, Gabriele Münter, Alexej von Jawlensky, and Marianne von Werefkin, and thus German expressionism was also exhibited in the salon.
And NOW ?
4. Albert Marquet, Affiches à Trouville, 1906, Oil on canvas, 65,1 x 81,3 cm, National Gallery of Art, Washington, Collection of Mr. and Mrs. John Hay Whitney
While the show presented more or less 160 works, most of them coming from private collection and museums in North America, this show is not a perfect show, and it's not as good as the one of Camille Pissarro, which was presented approximately two years ago.
While I appreciated the fact to devote an exhibition around Fauvism, which is quite an unknown and uncollected period of art in Swiss institutions, I would deeply appreciate to have a wider focus point on the artists they selected, some of them are female, that's true, but still European, even in the last room of the exhibition where you see the influence Fauvism had on modern art.
Regarding the orientation of the show and its different section, it's quite complex.
The first room of the exhibition don't include anything from Moreau or the class of Moreau, and the second room lack the presence of works by Signac, and his Neo impressionist works which lead Matisse to visit Collioure and start Fauvism with Derain.
It's the same problem with the third room dedicated to Normandy, where you don't see any reflection, or comparison to the depiction of the landscape, painter did at the same time or even a reflection about the use of port, trade route, and the use of water as a motif for Fauvist painters.
The room with the still life and the family portrait doesn't make a lot of sense, and it would have been preferable to make a room dedicated to the salon, which is written and talked in every room guide, but it's not even used as a focus point. The same goes for the room of the gallerist Berthe Weill, which present just 2-3 works.
The room about the nightlife and the landscape should be divided, there shroud be one room for each theme, like they did with the "Pastoral" room and the room with the drawings and the decorative art.
Lastly, the last room of the exhibition lack a lot of context about the market of Fauvist artworks and its reception, did we had a lot of collectors buying this art? Did we know a lot of artists which bought this sort of pictures? Did we get a retrospective or a gallery exhibition of the fauve after the salon? Or was it too late for them? Is this art movement more collected in North America? Europe? Why does the Kunstmuseum and Switzerland in general don't have a lot of Fauvist works in their collection? So many question are left but not a single respond.
Informations about the exhibition
Place: Kunstmuseum Basel
Date: 2.9.2023 - 21.1.2024
Curator: Arthur Fink, Claudine Grammont and Josef Helfenstein
Ticket: Available on the website of the Kunstmuseum Basel OR at the front desk of the museum
Informations about the Kunstmuseum Basel
Kunstmuseum Basel
St. Alban-Graben 8
CH-4010 Basel
Phone: +41 61 206 62 62
Fax: +41 61 206 62 52
Mail: info@kunstmuseumbasel.ch