The cage of wild beasts
When the Salon d’Automne opened, Woman with a Hat did not hang alone. It hung in Room VII, a single gallery that had become, more or less by accident, the loudest room in the building. On its walls were Matisse and a loose band of like-minded painters, André Derain, Maurice de Vlaminck, Albert Marquet, Henri Manguin, Charles Camoin, Kees van Dongen, all of them working in the same key of raw, unmixed, untruthful color. Walk into Room VII and the wall hit you as a single blaze of clashing pigment. To a public raised on the smooth, brown-gravy finish of the official Salon, it looked less like an exhibition than an accident in a paint factory.
And then there was the bust. Sitting in the middle of all that visual noise was a small, demure marble bust of a child, carved in a polite old-fashioned style by an unrelated sculptor named Albert Marque. The contrast, a prim classical sculpture marooned in a sea of wild color, was too good for a critic to pass up. The critic in question was Louis Vauxcelles (1870–1943; pronounced “voh-SELL”), writing in the newspaper Gil Blas on 17 October 1905. Looking at the gentle marble surrounded by the savage canvases, he wrote a line that would name a movement: “Donatello chez les fauves”, “Donatello among the wild beasts.” (Donatello was a celebrated sculptor of the Italian Renaissance, the great rebirth of classical art in the 1400s; the gentle bust stood in for him. Les fauvesis French for “the wild beasts.”)
The word stuck. The room became known as “la cage aux fauves”, the cage of wild beasts, and the painters in it became the Fauves, and their way of working became Fauvism. It is worth noticing that they never chose the name. It was an insult, coined by a hostile critic, and they wore it for the rest of art history because the insult was too vivid to shake. (Vauxcelles would do it again three years later, sneering at “little cubes” in a Braque show and accidentally naming Cubism too. He had a real talent for it.) Of all the canvases in that cage, Woman with a Hat was the single most notorious. It was the picture people stopped in front of, the one they argued about.
The arguments were not kind. The public found the painting crude, mad, even infantile, the work of someone who either could not paint or was mocking the people who could. What undid them was the green nose, the mauve cheek, the shadow painted the wrong color, paint that refused to match anything a viewer could actually see, smeared across a human face. Viewers were, in the museum’s flat summary, “utterly shocked.” This was not the gentle bafflement that had greeted the Impressionists a generation earlier. It was closer to insult, as if the painter had walked up to the idea of a respectable portrait and spat on it.
One thing to be careful about, because the histories sometimes overreach. It is tempting to call this “the first Fauve painting” or to say it “began Fauvism,” and you should resist both. Fauvism was not born in this one canvas. It was worked out over the summer of 1905 at Collioure, across several painters, Matisse and Derain chief among them, and it was named here at the Salon by Vauxcelles’s jibe. What Woman with a Hat truly was is the picture that became the face of the scandal, the single image the whole uproar gathered around. That is a large enough claim, and it has the advantage of being true.