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Juriste Paris
Henri Matisse led a small but powerful group of French artists into the 20th Century by introducing Fauvism in 1905. The group painted primarily for the sake of color with no agenda and no formal theories, against the grain of Impressionist ideals emphasizing realism and representation.
As a student at École des Beaux-Arts in Paris under the tutelage of professor and painter Gustave Moreau, Matisse and contemporaries André Derain and Maurice Vlaminck found inspiration in their mentor’s leadership toward emotion and expressive qualities in art. Georges Braque and Raoul Dufy, among others, were influenced by the group’s premise later on.
Origins of Fauvism
A number of factors contributed to the strong, short lived advance of Fauvism. Major exhibitions in the early 1900s exposed young painters for the first time to the work of influential artists like Vincent Van Gogh and Paul Cezanne, whose palettes were limited only by their imaginations. Many historians credit the Fauvists for ushering in the era of Modern Art, forming a bridge between Post-Impressionism in the late 1800’s and Cubism that took hold by 1908.