Room VII
The pictures from Collioure, and from the other future Fauves, went on the wall that autumn at the Salon d’Automne, the “Autumn Salon,” a newer, more adventurous yearly exhibition set up in 1903 by artists tired of the stuffy official Salon. (A Salon, in this whole era, is the big public art exhibition where reputations were made or destroyed; by 1905 there were several rival ones, the official Salon, the no-jury Salon des Indépendants, and this Autumn Salon.) The 1905 edition opened on 18 October at the Grand Palais in Paris and hung the new work together in one space, Room VII: Matisse, Derain, Vlaminck, Marquet, Manguin, Camoin, the Dutchman Kees van Dongen and others, wall after wall of raw, clashing, unmixed color with no shading to calm it down.
A polite marble caught in the wild
In the middle of that room, by chance, sat something from another world entirely: a small, Renaissance-style marble bust by a sculptor named Albert Marque (paired in Vauxcelles’s own account with a child’s torso nearby), all smooth classical restraint, marooned in the blaze of color around it. The critic Louis Vauxcelles, writing in the newspaper Gil Blas on 17 October 1905 (a preview, the day before the Salon opened its doors to the public on the 18th), looked at the polite little marble surrounded by the riot and wrote the line that named a movement: “Donatello chez les fauves.” Donatello among the wild beasts, Donatello being the great gentle sculptor of the Italian Renaissance, les fauves meaning literally the wild beasts, the big predatory cats. The joke was that a civilized old-master sculpture had wandered into a den of savages. The word fauves stuck. The room itself picked up a nickname, la cage aux fauves, the cage of wild beasts. And so the movement got its name the way it got everything else, from the outside, from an enemy, as an insult, and the painters kept it because it was the only thing anyone agreed to call them.
The coinage has its own legend layer, which is fitting for a movement built on stories. In a 1939 book Vauxcelles recalled that the comparison may have first come from an unknown bystander who muttered something like it on the spot. Treat the 1905 Gil Blas line as the documented origin and the bystander as Vauxcelles’s own much later memory.
The scandal, and the Steins
The public reaction was real and ugly. The work was called infantile, deranged, barely paintings at all; critics reached for the oldest insult in the box, the idea of a picture as a pot of paint simply flung in the public’s face. (That exact “pot of paint” jeer is most securely Ruskin’s, hurled at Whistler back in 1877, and critics in 1905 were reaching for an off-the-shelf insult more than coining a fresh one; the air was full of it.) The French president, Émile Loubet, reportedly declined to formally inaugurate the Salon, a small official cold shoulder. Matisse, already poor and now publicly mocked, was demoralized.
And then, out of that same hostile room, came the rescue. Two Americans living in Paris, Leo and Gertrude Stein, bought Woman with a Hat, the very portrait people were laughing at, straight off the Salon wall for 500 francs. (The face they bought was Matisse’s wife Amélie, who modeled for him through these poverty years and helped keep the household afloat while he painted; she is the woman in the hat, not a hired model.) For the broke and stung Matisse it was a lifeline, and for modern art it was the start of something larger. The avant-garde (the term, borrowed from the military, means the scouts who ride out ahead of the main army, and it got pinned to the artists who got somewhere first) was acquiring its first serious patrons. The Steins were really two households, Leo and Gertrude, and Henri’s brother Michael with his wife Sarah Stein, and it was Sarah and Michael who became the more committed Matisse collectors of the two, Sarah even studying with him. Soon the Russian collector Sergei Shchukin in Moscow began buying, and would end up Matisse’s single most prolific patron. A picture the public found unbearable, several people wanted enough to fight over.