Two events, one direction
Fauvism is the shortest of the great modern movements, and the reason it died so fast is almost as clean as the reason it was born. Two events, both in 1907, pulled the air out of the room, and both pointed the same way, away from color and toward structure.
The first was a dead painter’s homecoming. In 1907 the Salon d’Automne, the same Autumn Salon that had birthed the scandal two years earlier, mounted a large retrospective of Paul Cézanne, who had died the previous autumn. Cézanne had spent his life doing the near-opposite of the Fauves: building a picture out of carefully weighed planes, treating a landscape or a still life as a kind of architecture, the canvas as a solid construction rather than a flush of feeling. He would let a single tabletop tilt at two angles at once, or stack a hillside of houses into a pile of blocks, so that a painting felt assembled rather than glimpsed. Seeing his whole career laid out at once swung the most ambitious young painters hard toward that idea. Suddenly the live question was not “what color does the picture want?” but “how is the picture built?”
The second event was that roomful of impossible women. Picasso’s Les Demoiselles d’Avignon (1907) cracked open the door to Cubism, the movement that would take Cézanne’s structural obsession and run it to its limit, faceting the world into geometric planes. (The Cubism reads in this era cover the Demoiselles and Cubism’s birth in full; here it is enough that it pulled the avant-garde the same direction Cézanne did, toward structure and away from hot emotional color.)
The band scatters
With the wind blowing toward structure, the loose Fauve band came apart fast, because there was nothing holding it together but a shared mood. Georges Braque, who had been a late and brief Fauve (he caught the color only around 1906–07), spent the summer of 1908 at L’Estaque in the south shedding Fauve color and painting hard, blocky, cube-like landscapes. Those very pictures gave the next movement its name, and the man who named it was Matisse: looking at Braque’s L’Estaque canvases, he reportedly remarked to Vauxcelles that they were built of little cubes, and the critic who had coined “fauves” now coined “Cubism.” The leader of Fauvism had named the movement that would help kill it. Braque became Picasso’s Cubist partner. Derain, Matisse’s Collioure partner, cooled toward a darker, more structured, near-classical manner. Dufy and Friesz also took up Cézanne’s architecture. By around 1908 the group, as a group, had effectively dissolved.
That endpoint is a soft one, worth saying plainly: the intense group phase runs roughly 1905 to 1908, the last group-ish showings trail off around then, and stray pictures people still call “Fauve” turn up a little later. The movement did not so much end on a date as evaporate, as one by one its painters found a different question more interesting.
A creed that arrived too late
And it was in the middle of this scattering, on 25 December 1908, that the nearest thing Fauvism ever had to a statement finally appeared, far too late to be one. Matisse published an essay, “Notes of a Painter,” in the Paris journal La Grande Revue, answering the critics who still found the new painting baffling. “What I am after, above all, is expression,” he wrote, and what he meant by it was the whole arrangement of a picture, not any one thing in it: “Composition is the art of arranging in a decorative manner the diverse elements at the painter’s command to express his feelings.” It is a clear, generous account of how to paint, and it spoke for exactly one painter. By the time it ran, the band it might have rallied had already walked off toward Cézanne and Cubism. The closest thing Fauvism had to a flag was raised over an empty field.
Matisse alone, and the permission that stays
So Fauvism ends almost the way it began, with no ceremony and no document, just a handful of painters quietly walking off in a new direction. But one of them did not walk off. Matisse never went Cubist. He carried the color project forward by himself for another forty-five years, Dance, The Red Studio, and at the very end the great paper cut-outs, the single longest line drawn out of those weeks at Collioure.
And the idea outlived the movement by a century. In the story Western painting tells about itself, Fauvism is the first movement of the twentieth century and the first one made almost entirely by scandal, and for all its looseness it did one enormous thing once and permanently: it broke the bond between a color and the thing it was supposed to report. German Expressionism took that freedom and made it anguished; Kandinsky took it and walked off the edge of the visible world into abstraction; Matisse himself rode it for forty more years into the flat, glowing paper cut-outs of his old age. The band lasted three years. What it won never went back.