978-3-422-80119-6_MatisseDerainandFriends_EN

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EDITED BY
ARTHUR FINK
CLAUDINE GRAMMONT
JOSEF HELFENSTEIN
KUNSTMUSEUM BASEL
DEUTSCHER KUNSTVERLAG
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74 REPRINTS
77 LE SALON D’AUTOMNE
L’ILLUSTRATION, Nº 3271, NOVEMBER 4, 1905
80 LOUIS VAUXCELLES, LE SALON D’AUTOMNE
GIL BLAS, OCTOBER 17, 1905
88 LOUIS VAUXCELLES, LA VIE ARTISTIQUE
GIL BLAS, OCTOBER 26, 1905
92 MICHEL PUY, LES FAUVES
LA PHALANGE, NOVEMBER 15, 1907
102 GELETT BURGESS, THE WILD MEN OF PARIS
THE ARCHITECTURAL RECORD, Nº 140, MAY 1910
119 PLATES
239 CHRONOLOGY
250 APPENDIX
253 BIBLIOGRAPHY
256 IMAGE CREDITS
257 LIST OF WORKS
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ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
The exhibition was made possible by the generous support of:
Art Mentor Foundation Lucerne
Bundesamt für Kultur
Credit Suisse (Schweiz AG)
Isaac Dreyfus-Bernheim Stiftung
Karin Endress
Simone und Peter Forcart-Staehelin
Dorette Gloor-Krayer
Rita und Christoph Gloor
Annetta Grisard-Schrafl
Stiftung für das Kunstmuseum Basel
Trafina Privatbank AG
Heivisch
Anonymous sponsors
The Kunstmuseum Basel would like to thank the international public
and private collections for their generous support and loans.
Austria
Albertina, Vienna, Klaus Albrecht Schröder
Sammlung Batliner, Albertina, Vienna, Klaus Albrecht Schröder
Denmark
Statens Museum for Kunst, Copenhagen, Mikkel Bogh
France
Fondation Jean et Suzanne Planque, Musée Granet, Aix-en-Provence,
Bruno Ely
Musée des Beaux-Arts, Bordeaux, Sophie Barthélémy
Musée Unterlinden, Colmar, Pantxika De Paepe
Musée de Grenoble, Grenoble, Guy Tosatto
Archives Henri Matisse, Issy-les-Moulineaux, Anne Théry
Musée d’art moderne André Malraux, Le Havre, Annette Haudiquet
Musée des Beaux-Arts de Lyon, Lyon, Sylvie Ramond
Musée Cantini, Marseille, Guillaume Theulière
Musée Matisse, Nice, Claudine Grammont, Aymeric Jeudy
Galerie Bernard Bouche, Paris, Bernard Bouche
Galerie de la Présidence, Paris, Florence Chibret-Plaussu
Centre Pompidou, Paris, Laurent Le Bon, Xavier Rey
Collection Larock, Paris, Marc Larock
Musée d’art moderne de la ville de Paris, Paris, Fabrice Hergott
Musée d’Orsay, Paris, Christophe Leribault
Musée d’art moderne et contemporain, Strasbourg, Paul Lang
Musée de l’Annonciade, Saint-Tropez, Séverine Berger
Germany
Lehmbruck Museum, Duisburg, Söke Dinkla
Kunstsammlung Nordrhein-Westfalen, Düsseldorf, Susanne Gaensheimer
Museum Folkwang, Essen, Peter Gorschlüter
Collection Hasso Plattner, Potsdam, Stephanie Ullrich
Arp Museum Bahnhof Rolandseck, Remagen, Julia Wallner, Susanne Blöcker
Staatsgalerie Stuttgart, Stuttgart, Christiane Lange
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United Kingdom
Tate Modern, London, Maria Balshaw
Japan
Musée Marie Laurencin, Tokyo, Hirohisa Yoshizawa
Spain
Colección Carmen Thyssen, Museo Thyssen-Bornemisza, Madrid,
Guillermo Solana
Switzerland
Jacques Herzog und Pierre de Meuron Kabinett, Basel
Musée des Beaux-Arts de La Chaux-de-Fonds, David Lemaire
Association des Amis du Petit Palais, Geneva, Claude Ghez
Galerie Rosengart, Lucerne, Angela Rosengart
Sammlung Pieter + Catherine Coray, Montagnola
Hahnloser/Jaeggli Stiftung, Villa Flora, Winterthur, Beat Denzler
Sammlung Emil Bührle, Kunsthaus Zürich, Zurich, Lukas Gloor
Sammlung Gabriele und Werner Merzbacher, Kunsthaus Zürich, Zurich
Kunsthaus Zürich, Zurich, Ann Demeester, Philippe Büttner
United States
The Los Angeles County Museum of Art, Los Angeles, Michael Govan
The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, Max Hollein
The Museum of Modern Art, New York, Glenn D. Lowry, Ann Temkin
National Gallery of Art, Washington, Kaywin Feldman
And all private lenders who do not wish to be named.
We would like to express our sincere thanks to the authors of the catalog:
Arthur Fink
Claudine Grammont
Gabrielle Houbre
Peter Kropmanns
Maureen Murphy
Pascal Rousseau
The curators would like to thank all those who supported them in the
planning and implementation of the project:
Raphael Bouvier, Anna Brailovsky, Philippe Büttner, Florence Chibret-Plaussu,
Elena Degen, Sandra Gianfreda, Ruth und Peter Herzog, Gabrielle Houbre,
Rudolf Koella, Jelena Kristic, Jean-Pierre Manguin, Frédéric Paul, Isolde
Pludermacher, Nadja Putzi, Assia Quesnel, Susanne Sauter, Teo Schifferli,
Geneviève Taillade, Imogen Taylor, Anne Théry
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FOREWORD
JOSEF HELFENSTEIN
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1 Matisse, “On Modernism
and Tradition,” in
Matisse on Art, ed. Jack D.
Flam (London: Phaidon,
1973), p. 136.
The exhibition Matisse, Derain, and Their Friends: The Paris Avant-Garde
1904–1908 is the first major survey on the Fauves to be shown in Switzerland
in decades. It harks back to a pathbreaking curatorial project: the
first institutional exhibition on this group outside of France, organized by
Arnold Rüdlinger at the Kunsthalle Bern in 1950, when art-historical research
into the movement was just beginning. The first significant monograph,
Georges Duthuit’s Les Fauves, was also published around the same time.
Fauvism was the first avant-garde movement of the twentieth
century. It shaped the discourses of painting in the modernist era and beyond.
The artists who became canonized in art history as Fauves were concerned
with liberating painting from a highly codified set of academic
rules. Their ambition was to revolutionize painting through subjective, direct
forms of expression. They advocated for a simplification of technical
means through a radical departure from painterly conventions. Matisse,
whom contemporary art critics called the “Prince,” “King,” “Chief,” and the
“Fauve of the Fauves,” commented laconically in retrospect that “tradition
was rather out of favor by reason of having been so long respected.” 1
Derain, Vlaminck, Matisse, and their friends made color tangible as a concrete
material. In their work, the process of applying paint becomes immediately
evident, and brushstrokes have a tactile quality. They dispensed
with established modes of modeling such as chiaroscuro shading and
outlines, and instead emphasized the flatness of the pictorial support and
no longer tried to divide the pictorial space hierarchically into foreground,
middle ground, and background. The canvas as a two-dimensional support
was accentuated by the frequent occurrence of unpainted areas.
As is the case with the Impressionists, the label “Fauves” originated
with a disparaging phrase that was rarely used by the artists themselves
at the time. The term Fauves (Eng. wildcats or wild animals) comes
from a review of the Salon d’Automne 1905 by Louis Vauxcelles {→ pp. 80–87},
in which he used the word in two different ways. First, the term was for
him emblematic of the disdain with which conservative critics reacted to
the paintings of the young painters. Vauxcelles describes Matisse as an
artist who boldly enters the arena of the wild beasts (in the Salon). At the
same time, he used the term to describe the impact of the paintings. The
influential critic was referring specifically to the expressive application of
paint and the unusual color combinations, which violated the conventions
of painting at the time in a revolutionary way. The pictures seemed garish
and shocking to contemporary audiences, and moreover featured thematic
references to French peinture naïve and borrowed formally from
non-Western art and medieval pictorial traditions. Exhibited in the same
room was a bust by Albert Marque {→ p. 129}, which in its formal design
embodied a traditional understanding of art influenced by the Italian High
Renaissance. This sculpture, said the critic, appeared as if it had landed
in the midst of an “orgy of pure color”— a “Donatello chez les Fauves”
(Donatello among the wild beasts). According to anecdotal accounts, the
critic had already made a similar statement at the opening of the exhibition
(“Tiens, Donatello au milieu des fauves!”), where the analogy caused so
much laughter that he used it again in the press. Contrary to popular belief,
however, the term did not take hold immediately. It would not be used by
Vauxcelles to refer to the artists directly until two years later, in a review
of the 1907 Salon des Indépendants. The designation ultimately became
established toward the end of 1907 in part due to an essay by Michel Puy
{→ pp. 92–101}. By this time, however, the loose association of artists was already
fraying. Braque and Derain were drawn to the Bateau-Lavoir, where
Picasso had his studio. They were interested in a new style of painting that
would later be canonized as Cubism (incidentally, this term, too, originated
9

7 In the Matisse literature,
see Schneider, Matisse,
1984, p. 29: “The Virgin Mary
escapes [from the painting],
leaving behind the open
book, the emblem of her
piety, the vessel that signified
her purity, and the
glass that is pierced by the
light without breaking, symbolizing
the Immaculate
Conception. Kalf, Stosskopf,
Chardin and Matisse, one
after the other, inherit the
vessel, the glass and the
book, as one inherits objects
whose value was obvious
to a foremother, but passed
away with her. The still life,
the ‘nature morte,’ is the
flotsam and jetsam that remains
on the surface of
the painting when meaning
has withdrawn: the visible
world, perceptible to our
senses, abandoned by vision.”
8 Victor I. Stoichita,
L’instauration du tableau:
métapeinture à l’aube des
temps modernes (Paris:
Méridiens Klincksieck, 1993),
pp. 29–41.
9 For a discussion of still
life discourses in antiquity,
as well as of Cézanne’s still
life as a blueprint for the
modus operandi of modernist
still lifes, which do not
represent objects but rather
present new painterly
propositions, see Norman
Bryson, Looking at the
Overlooked: Four Essays
on Still Life Painting (London:
Reaktion Books 1990),
pp. 7–59, pp. 60–95.
10 Richard Shiff, “Morality,
Materiality, Apples,” in The
World Is an Apple: The Still
Lifes of Paul Cézanne, ed.
Benedict Leca, exh. cat., The
Barnes Foundation, Philadelphia,
and the Art Gallery
of Hamilton, Ontario, 2014–
2015 (London: Giles, 2014),
pp. 145–93.
11 Matisse bought a
painting by Cézanne from
Vollard the year before,
as well as a work each by
Gauguin and Van Gogh.
Hillary Spurling, The Unknown
Matisse: Man of the North
1869–1908 (London: Penguin
Books 1998), pp. 187–88.
12 Vischer, “Beobachtungen
zu Chardins Einfluss auf
die Stillebenmalerei im 19.
Jahrhundert an Beispielen
von Manet, Courbet und
Cézanne,” in exh. cat. Basel
1998, pp. 117–35. For details
see, exh. cat., Cézanne,
Picasso, Braque: Der Beginn
des kubistischen Stilllebens
(Ostfildern-Ruit:
Hatje, 1998).
13 Wildenstein, 1963,
pp. 9–10. There is a statement
Chardin is known to have
made about painting still
lifes that is particularly
interesting in the context of
Fauvism: “Here is an object
that must be reproduced.
If I want to reproduce it
faithfully, I must forget everything
I have seen so far,
even how others have depicted
these objects. I must
distance it so far from me
that I no longer recognize
the details. I must direct my
main attention to reproducing
as appropriately and
faithfully as possible the
mass as such, the color shading,
the roundness, the
effect of light and shadow.”
Nicolas Cochin the Younger,
“Essai sur la vie de M.
Chardin” (1780), ed. Ch. De
Beaurepaire, in Précis analytique
des travaux de
l’Académie des Sciences,
Belles-Lettres et Arts de
Rouen, vol. 58, 1875–1876,
pp. 417–41; trans. the author.
14 Wildenstein, ibid.,
pp. 50–52.
it moves into the center of aesthetic debates again
in the late nineteenth century.7 According to a wellestablished
art-historical model that explains the
genesis of the genre, still life should be understood
as the accessories of a sacred image emancipating
themselves to become an autonomous picture.8 At
the same time, there is the topos of the secret language
of still life, of a resistant deeper meaning
that cannot be accessed. By virtue of its muteness,
still life positively calls out for the decoding of its
ciphers and offers itself up to being questioned
through the medium of painting, since in it, the fundamentals
of pictorial representation are made
visible. Indeed, one of the primal scenes of art
history—the imitatio contest between Zeuxis and
Parrhasius described by Pliny—revolves around
two still lifes: one image depicting grapes that deceive birds, and
another that shows a curtain capable of deceiving people.9
The fact that still life painting played a central role in Fauvism
has to do with two historic artistic predecessors who served as models
for the young artists. Around 1900, Paul Cezanne was known to
be a pivotal reference figure (“cézannisme” was at its peak in the
immediate period after his death in 1906).10 Cezanne’s apples had
become icons: Compotier, Verre et Pommes of 1879–80 {FIG. 1} was
already being passed around in the 1880s and 1890s by its owner
Paul Gauguin as a teaching piece. He would take it with him to the
restaurant in the evenings to show it to his pupils and quoted it in
his own paintings. Accordingly, the artists of the Nabis revered this
painting and Maurice Denis commemorated it in his Hommage à
Cézanne (1900 {FIG. 2}), which depicts the Nabis painters conversing
around the painting in the gallery of Ambroise Vollard, who would
also exhibit Derain and Vlaminck a few years later.11 The painting was
purchased by the author (and critic of the Fauves) André Gide.
What Cezanne was to the Nabis, the Fauves, and the Cubists,
Jean Siméon Chardin had earlier been to the generation of artists
that formed around 1860.12 He too was a figure shrouded in myth,
and also an outsider. He came from a family of craftsmen and was
trained in a guild as a decorative painter. In part for this reason, he did
not paint history paintings and was ridiculed as a sausage painter. In
1728, he managed by a ruse to become a member
of the Académie Royale despite his non-academic
training.13 In the mid-nineteenth century, he was
rediscovered by young artists and writers; his works
first began to enter the Louvre, where they were
actively copied.14 The fascination with Chardin’s
works in the Louvre would continue throughout
the following decades.15 In 1893, Matisse copied his
first work in the Louvre: La Tabagie (Pipes et vase
à boire) {FIG. 3}.16 And the twenty-four-year-old Marcel
Proust (following in the footsteps of Diderot and
the Goncourt brothers) wrote a fragmentary hymn
of praise to him in 1895. That year, a retrospective
was dedicated to the painter at the Palais Galliera.
{1} Paul Cezanne, Compotier, Verre et Pommes
(Fruit bowl, Glass, and Apples), 1879–80
Oil on canvas, 46.4 × 54.6 cm
The Museum of Modern Art, New York
15 “Yes, I often go to the
Louvre. What I study most
there is the work of Chardin.
I go to the Louvre to study
his technique.” Clara Mac-
Chesney, “A Talk with Matisse,
Leader of Post-Impressionists,”
The New York Times,
March 9, 1913, cited in EPA,
p. 54, note 22.
16 Spurling, The Unknown
Matisse, 1998, pp. 85–87.
The work is not extant.
Copies of Le Buffet and La
Raie as well as La Pourvoyeuse
are also documented.
See Alexis Merle du Bourg,
Chardin (Paris: Citadelles,
2020), p. 345.
{2} Maurice Denis, Hommage à Cézanne
(Tribute to Cézanne), 1900
Oil on canvas, 180 × 240 cm
Musée d’Orsay, Paris
46

{3} Jean Baptiste Siméon Chardin, Pipes et vase à boire
(Pipes and Drinking Vessel), ca. 1750–75
Musée du Louvre, Paris
Proust describes Chardin as a master who leads us
into the magic of the mundane, humble world of
things, like Virgil leads Dante into the underworld:
From Chardin we have learned that a pear is as
alive as a woman, a plain earthenware vessel as
beautiful as a precious stone. The painter proclaimed
the divine equality of all things before
the mind that contemplates them and the light
that embellishes them. He made us leave behind
a false ideal so as to enter more broadly into the
world of reality and find the beauty that is everywhere,
no longer the languishing captive of
convention or poor taste, but free, robust, and
universal; in opening up to the real world, he
draws us out onto a sea of beauty.17
MATISSE’S EARLY STILL LIFES
The first two still lifes on view in the exhibition date from the winter
of 1898–99, which Matisse spent in Toulouse {→ p. 123}. In the early summer
of 1898, while in Corsica, he reads Paul Signac’s essay “D’Eugène
Delacroix au néo-impressionisme,” published in Revue Blanche. This
text enables Matisse, who is quite conscious of tradition, to anchor
his own aspirations in a well-grounded, contemporary intellectual
framework, and he adopts the painterly principles formulated within
the essay as his own.18 Matisse’s reception of Signac’s essay is evident
in Nature morte: Buffet et table, albeit with some deviations from the
Neo-Impressionist doxa: the painting features multiple focal points
as well as indistinct areas of the image where the contours of the
objects become blurred (in the case of the tableware). Moreover, there
are outlines and the brushstroke sometimes changes direction, which
also serves to outline the objects. The other still lifes with oranges
created during this period, including Nature morte aux fruits from the
Rosengart Collection, do not show direct signs of Signac’s influence,
but are marked by his painterly conceit that a brushstroke no longer
has to be descriptive—i.e., it can have a life of its own as a pictorial
unit and does not have to coincide with what is depicted. The pictorial
signs detach themselves from the represented object. Orange is
not necessarily bound to the orange.19
At this time, Matisse was also studying the painting of Chardin
and Cezanne in depth, in addition to Signac’s color theory. These
different influences, as well as Matisse’s probing, critical appropriation
are evident in the series of still lifes with oranges.20 This series
is considered the first in which the same object is rendered in different
ways of seeing/painting. Oranges are often seen in literature as
a symbol of Mediterranean light. As a fruit, they are, so to speak,
reservoirs of sunlight. Apollinaire dedicated the closing line to the
orange in the poem “Les fenêtres” (1918): “La fenêtre s’ouvre comme
une orange / Le beau fruit de la lumière.”21 The orange as a motif also
seems to be a reference to the reception of the still lifes of Gauguin,
who often painted them as well. Cezanne’s apples, on the other hand,
do not appear in Matisse’s work as a direct pictorial quotation.
17 “Nous avions appris de
Chardin qu’une poire est
aussi vivante qu’une femme,
qu’une poterie vulgaire est
aussi belle qu’une pierre
précieuse. Le peintre avait
proclamé la divine egalité
de toutes choses devant l’ésprit
qui les considère, devant
la lumière qui les embellit.
Il nous avait fait sortir
d’un faux idéal pour pénétrer
largement dans la réalité,
pour y retrouver partout la
beauté, non plus prissonière
afffaiblie d’une convention
ou d’un faux goût mais libre,
forte, universelle; en nous
ouvrant le monde réel c’est
sur la mer de beauté quíl
nous entraîne.” Posthum
erstmals erschienen in Le
Figaro littéraire, March 27.
1954. Cited in Marcel Proust,
Chardin and Rembrandt,
trans. Jennie Feldman (New
York: David Zwirner Books,
2016), p. 22. For an in-depth
discussion of the text see
Christie McDonald, “I am
[not] a painting: how Chardin
and Moreau dialogue in
Proust’s writing,” in Christie
McDonald and François
Proulx, eds., Proust and the
Arts (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge
University Press,
2015), pp. 40–52.
18 Flam, Matisse, 1986,
pp. 58–60. Several such
works were produced. For
a detailed account of the
reception, see Catherine C.
Bock, Henri Matisse and
Neo-Impressionism 1898–
1908 (Ann Arbor: UMI
Research Press, 1981).
19 Flam, Matisse, p. 61.
20 In his chats with Pierre
Courthion, Matisse describes
how he moved away from
faithful color reproduction
when painting still lifes: “The
first works I did from nature
were always a bit simplistic
in their composition. Or, to
be precise, they lacked composition
altogether. I felt
that nature was so beautiful
that all I had to do was reproduce
it as simply as I
could. I sat down in front of
the objects I felt drawn to
and identified with them,
trying to create a double of
them on the canvas. But
then I was influenced by
sensations that led me away
from the trompe l’oeil; the
green of an apple didn’t
match the green on my palette
but something immaterial,
something that I needed
to find. I remember meditating
on a lemon. It was posed
on the corner of a black
mantelpiece. Suppose I managed
to copy that lemon,
what would I have gained
by it? Why did it interest
me? Was it such a very beautiful
lemon—the loveliest
lemon ever? Why take all the
trouble to see it rendered
(more or less eternal) on canvas
when I could replicate
my admiration with one just
like it—a real piece of fruit
that, once I got bored of contemplating
it, would make
me a nice cool drink? Deduction
by deduction, I realized
that what interested
me was the relation created
by contemplation between
the objects present: the
yellow of the lemon peel on
the shiny black marble of
the mantelpiece. And I had
to invent something that
would render the equivalent
of my sensation. A sort of
emotional communion was
created among the objects
placed before me.” Pierre
Courthion, Henri Matisse,
Bavardages: les entretiens
égarés, ed. Serge Guilbaut
(Milan: Skira 2017), p. 224.
21 Apollinaire, Calligrammes,
2014, p. 15.
47

5 For a recent and precise
study of this genealogy,
see Joshua I. Cohen, “Rethinking
Fauve ‘Primitivism,’”
in The “Black Art” Renaissance:
African Sculpture
and Modernism across
Continents (Oakland: University
of California Press,
2020), pp. 23–54.
6 See Johannes Fabian,
Le Temps et les autres:
Comment l’anthropologie
construit son objet (Toulouse:
Anarchasis, 2006;
repr. 2014).
7 For African art, see
Yaëlle Biro, Fabriquer le regard:
Marchands, réseaux
et objets d’art africains
à l’aube du XXème siècle
(Dijon: Les presses du réel,
2018).
8 Romain Bertrand,
Histoire.
Much ink has been spilled on the subject of the masks, relics,
and statuettes that were brought to Europe from Africa or Oceania—
not in order to shed light on their meaning or history, but to establish
a genealogy of their “discovery” by European artists.5 It is now generally
agreed that Vlaminck bought a Fang mask (Gabon) in a bistro
in Argenteuil in 1905 and sold it to Derain, and that Matisse purchased
a Kongo-Vili sculpture (Congo Republic) from Emil Heymann
at Au Vieux Rouet in 1906, on his way back from a visit to Leo and
Gertrude Stein. I will not dwell on these well-known and muchrepeated
facts, but will look instead at an aspect of the relationship
between European artists and their African or Oceanian sources of
inspiration that has often been overlooked: the history of the artifacts
themselves. Long consigned to a timeless present,6 these artifacts
were often exhibited without any mention of their historicity,
as for example at the controversial exhibition held at the New York
Museum of Modern Art in 1984, “Primitivism” in 20th-Century Art. In
fact, as we will see, the majority of works from Africa, Asia, the Americas,
and Oceania were contemporary with “modern” art. The artifacts
that the Fauves thought of as “distant” were actually very close,
but they were difficult to understand and obscured by an aura of
otherness created by the contemporary colonial context.
This context was essential to the encounter (or the misunderstanding)
between the Fauves and the artifacts from Africa, Asia,
the Americas, and Oceania. Although present in European collections
since the first cultural exchanges with Europe in the fifteenth century,
these objects did not attract the attention of artists until the
late nineteenth century, when they began to arrive in Europe in ever
greater quantities as a result of the colonial conquests and the growing
market for ethnographical curiosities;7 their appearance in museums
and colonial exhibitions coincided with an increasing number
of articles denouncing the scandals associated with colonialism in
places such as the Congo, Dahomey, and Namibia—among them, the
reports on the Herero genocide in the satirical journal L’Assiette au
Beurre. Maurice de Vlaminck, André Derain, Henri Matisse, and Kees
van Dongen in France, and Ernst Ludwig Kirchner and Emil Nolde in
Germany did not inhabit ivory towers; this is evident in their paintings.
These artists read the news and sometimes published caricatures
and drawings in the press; they were appreciative of photography
and the art of the postcard (which they made use of in their paintings),
and they nourished their libertarian impulses with the repellent and
fascinating tales of distant places that they found in newspapers
and journals. In order to restore the complexity of
the “primitivist” movement of the Fauves, I will consider
it from a globalized perspective sensitive to
the exchanges and circulation of ideas, images, and
objects, while at the same time attempting to write
a “more balanced history”8 that illuminates, as far
as possible, both the Fauvist approach and that of
the sculptors from Africa, Asia, the Americas, and
Oceania, most of whom, far from being historically
remote as the adjective “primitive” implies, were
contemporaries of the Fauves.
{2} Temple of Bayon and Cambodian antiquities
52

{3} Cover of Le Petit Parisien: Supplément littéraire illustré,
June 17, 1906
{4} Le Monde Illustré, May 6, 1882, Le Musée
ethnographique du Trocadéro
FROM ORIENTALISM TO PRIMITIVISM
According to a canonical history of art that proceeds by a
series of “isms,” Orientalism was followed by Japonism,
while primitivism marked the affirmation of a modern consciousness
in early twentieth-century artists. At the root
of all these words for artistic movements is a geographical
or temporal elsewhere: the Orient for Delacroix (a geography
whose ideological dimension we have been aware
of since Edward Said’s Orientalism)9 Japan for the Impressionists,
and the “primitives” for the Fauves and later the
Cubists. For the artifacts originating from Africa, Asia, the
Americas or Oceania, the geographical designation was
replaced by a temporal one as the word “primitive” denotes
anteriority. The logic of the avant-garde demanded
that artists seek far afield to find new forms of expression—but
that didn’t stop them from adding Persian, Greek,
or Egyptian references to their African, Asian, American,
or Oceanic sources.10 The Fauves combined their borrowings
to distinguish themselves from their predecessors;
at the heart of this repeated game of fusion were the people who in
those days were more often referred to not as “primitives” but as
“Negroes.” The violence of this word stems from its racial load: those
considered “Negro” were believed to belong to a distinct race defined
by skin color and deemed inferior to the “white” race. By extension,
any objects connected with that purported biological category
were indiscriminately labeled “Negro,” whether they came
from Africa, the Americas, or Oceania. Derain used the same word
when he told Matisse of his visit to the British Museum: “Heaped up
there pell-mell, as it were—pay attention now—were the Chinese,
the Negroes of Guinea, New Zealand, Hawaii, and the Congo, the
Assyrians, the Egyptians, the Etruscans, Phidias, the Romans, the Indians.”11
The confusion between artifacts and people can be explained
by the exhibition methods that had been practiced in museums since
the mid-nineteenth century. The Fauves were keen museumgoers,
often visiting the Louvre or the Museum of Comparative
Sculpture whose Indo-Chinese room featured a
life-size reconstruction of the Temple of Angkor Wat (Cambodia)
{FIG. 2}—probably, like the medieval statuary exhibited
opposite,12 an inspiration for certain details in Derain’s
Dance. Guillaume Apollinaire, Derain, and Picasso all roamed
the Trocadéro Museum of Ethnography, and the importance
of those visits, for Picasso in particular, is well known.13
9 Edward W. Said, Orientalism
(New York: Pantheon,
1978).
10 For the Fauves’ Egyptian
sources, see Philippe
Dagen, “L’Exemple égyptien:
Matisse, Derain et Picasso
entre fauvisme et cubisme
(1905–1908),” Bulletin de la
Société de l’histoire de l’art
français (1984), pp. 289–302.
See too, by the same author
Primitivismes: Une invention
moderne (Paris: Gallimard,
2019).
11 “Là sont entassés pêlemêle
pour ainsi dire, suivezmoi
bien, les Chinois, les
Nègres de la Guinée, de la
Nouvelle-Zélande, de Hawaï,
du Congo, les Assyriens, les
Egyptiens, les Etrusques,
Phidias, les Romains, les Indes.”
Letter from Derain to
Matisse, no date, ca. March
1906, Matisse archives,
quoted in Rémi Labrusse,
Matisse: La condition de
l’image (Paris: Gallimard,
1999), p. 52.
12 Derain was able to see
the plaster model of the
temple again when it was
displayed at the 1906 colonial
exhibition in Marseille,
where he was also struck by
the Cambodian dancers
{FIG. 3} who inspired a series
of watercolors by Rodin.
Writing about the Museum
of Comparative Sculpture
at the Trocadéro, Dominique
Jarrassé and Emmanuelle
Polack note that “the plaster
models of Egyptian,
Assyrian, and hieratic Greek
art [were exhibited] facing
French works of the eleventh
and twelfth centuries”
(“les moulages d’arts égyptiens,
assyriens et de la
période hiératique grecque
[étaient exposés] en regard
des œuvres du XVème et
XIIème français”). Jarrassé
and Polack, “Le Musée
de Sculpture Comparée au
prisme de la collection de
cartes postales éditées par
les frères Neurdein (1904–
1915),” Les Cahiers de l’École
du Louvre, 4, 2014, accessed
March 31, 2023, https://doi.
org/10.4000/cel.476.
13 “When I went to the
Trocadéro,” Picasso told
Malraux, “it was disgusting.
The flea market. The smell.
I was all alone. I wanted to
get away. But I didn’t leave.
I stayed. . . . I understood
why I was an artist. All alone
in that awful museum with
the masks and the redskin
dolls and the dusty mannequins”
(“Quand je suis allé
au trocadéro, c’était dégoûtant.
Le marché aux puces.
L’odeur. J’étais tout seul.
Je voulais m’en aller. Je ne
partais pas. Je restais. . . . J’ai
compris pourquoi j’étais
peintre. Tout seul dans ce
musée affreux, avec des
masques, des poupées peauxrouges,
des mannequins
poussiéreux”). André Malraux,
La Tête d’obsidienne (Paris:
Gallimard, 1974).
THE ROLE OF THE MUSEUMS
A place of trophies and accumulation whose displays combined
the spectacular with the scientific (or what passed
for such at the time), the Trocadéro Museum of Ethnography
celebrated the idea of military and ideological victory; the
artifacts and mannequins on show constituted the mechanisms
of the evolutionist and racist theories that aimed
to demonstrate the savagery of the dominated peoples in
53

14 In his correspondence
with Vlaminck, Derain wrote
in summer 1907: “What one
needs is to remain a child
forever; one could do beautiful
things all one’s life. If
instead one becomes civilized,
one becomes a machine
that adapts very well
to life, but nothing more”
(“Ce qu’il faut, c’est rester
éternellement enfant: on
pourrait faire de belles
choses toute sa vie. Autrement,
quand on se civilize,
on deviant une machine qui
s’adapte très bien à la vie
et c’est tout”). André Derain,
Lettres à Vlaminck: Suivies
de la correspondence de
guerre, ed. Philippe Dagen
(Paris: Flammarion, 1994),
p. 187.
15 In a letter from July 8,
1905, he wrote to Vlaminck
from Collioure: “Wherever I
go, I run into anarchists who
smash up the world every
evening and put it back together
again every morning.
It annoys me terribly, especially
when I think that I used
to be like that” (Partout où
je vais, je me flanque dans
des anarchistes qui brisent
le monde tous les soirs
et le reconstruisent tous les
matins. Ça m’ennuie beaucoup,
surtout d’avoir cru que
je l’étais). Letter 57 in Derain,
Lettres.
16 Patricia Leighten, “The
White Peril: Colonialism,
l’art nègre, and Les Demoiselles
d’Avignon,” in The
Liberation of Painting: Modernism
and Anarchism in
Avant-Guerre Paris (Chicago:
Chicago University Press,
2013).
17 For the role played by
Vollard in the Fauves’ careers,
see Rebecca Rabinow,
“Matisse, un rendez-vous
manqué,” in De Cézanne à
Picasso: Chefs-d’oeuvre de
la galerie Vollard, ed. Anne
Roqueberg et al., exh. cat.,
Metropolitan Museum of
Art, New York (Paris: Encyclopaedia
Universalis, 2007),
pp. 143–51.
order to justify the “civilizing mission” of colonization. Contemporary
images in periodicals such as Le Monde Illustré
{FIG. 4} give an impression of the theatricality of the place,
the sense of overcrowding and accumulation: the walls are
hung with military trophies; mannequins are displayed on
raised pedestals; objects ranging from crude to elaborate
are arranged in glass cabinets. Because they gave the illusion
of reconnecting with an original art untainted by culture
or machines, and because they were thought to establish
links with the prehistory of art, the artifacts from
Africa, Asia, the Americas, and Oceania captured the interest
of the Fauves, although the Fauves did not subscribe
to the imperial ideology surrounding them. Their commitment
to the noble and wild, to the childhood of art,14 and
the idea of radical otherness came closer to a rejection of
the West and the moral, bourgeois, military, and industrial
values with which it was associated.
ANARCHIST ANTICOLONIALISM
A sketch by Derain dated 1904 and titled “French Republic”
{FIG. 5}, shows the artist from behind, hands on hips, surrounded by a
priest, a gendarme, and a red-skinned woman, her naked body arched,
the epitome of the “natural woman”; she seems to be trying to get
away from the figure of the priest who is moving toward her. In this
drawing, the symbols of (religious and military) authority clash with
those of freedom (the savage woman, the artist) in a comical spirit
redolent of the caricatures designed and circulated in the anarchist
and anticolonial networks to which Derain belonged, at least for a
time.15 As Patricia Leighten recounts,16 Vlaminck, Odilon Redon, Roussel,
Maillol, and Derain regularly attended dinner parties organized by
Ambroise Vollard, the art dealer who helped promote the Fauves in
France and abroad.17 It was Vollard, too, who published Alfred Jarry’s
Illustrated Almanac in 1901 featuring his Ubu colonial, a
satirical anticolonial panorama combining the grotesque
and the absurd. Derain’s “Redskin” woman is clearly redolent
of the style of the Bonnard drawings that illustrate
Jarry’s text, and since Jarry published in L’Assiette au Beurre
and the anarchist journal La Revue blanche alongside Félix
Vallotton and Toulouse-Lautrec who were both admired
by the Fauves, he must have been known to Derain and his
circle. Those same journals, Patricia Leighten reminds us,
also published the caricatures denouncing the scandals
linked to colonization in the French Congo, the Belgian Congo,
and Dahomey. It is no coincidence that the artifacts
that inspired the Fauves came from those very countries.
{5} André Derain, République française
(French Republic), 1904
Pencil, ink, and Aquarelle on paper, 65 × 32.5 cm
Musée Fournaise, Chatou
{6} Fang-Mask (Gabon), arrived in France before 1906
Centre Pompidou, Paris
54

18 “To Paul Guillaume,
slave trader” (“A Paul
Guillaume, négrier”), Jean
Cocteau’s preface to the
first poetry and music recital
organized by Pierre
Bertin and held in Paul Guillaume’s
gallery on November
13, 1917: “Your little
Negro Fetishes,” Cocteau
writes, “protect our generation
whose task is to rebuild
on the charming rubble of
Impressionism . . . youth is
turning toward more robust
models. Only thus can the
universe become a pretext
for a new architecture of
sensitivity, instead of always
sparkling through eyelashes
blinking in the sun. If the
Negro eye is quite naked,
if nothing prevents things
from entering it directly, a
great religious tradition
must alter them before they
emerge from the hand.
Negro art should not therefore
be compared to the
disappointing flashes of
childhood or madness, but
to the noblest periods of
human civilization” (“Vos
petits fétiches nègres protègent
notre génération qui
a pour tâche de rebâtir sur
les décombres charmants
de l’impressionisme . . . la
jeunesse se tourne vers des
exemples robustes. C’est
seulement à ce prix que
l’univers peut devenir le prétexte
d’une nouvelle architecture
de la sensibilité au
lieu de chatoyer toujours
entre les cils clignés au soleil.
Or, si l’oeil nègre va
tout nu, si rien n’empêche
les choses d’y pénétrer
directement, c’est une grande
tradition religieuse qui les
déforme avant qu’elles
ne sortent par la main. L’art
nègre ne s’apparente donc
pas aux éclairs décevants
de l’enfance ou de la folie,
mais aux styles les plus
nobles de la civilisation humaine”).
Paul Guillaume
Archives, Orangery Museum,
Paris.
19 This remark is attributed
to artist and art dealer
Paul Brummer, interviewed
by Laurie Eglington in Art
News (October 27, 1934).
20 On the subject of this
mask, Vlaminck writes:
“The story of this Negro mask
has now become historic.
It is this mask that started
Negro art. . . . It is the first
piece of Negro art, from
which the Negro art movement
emerged, and which
gave rise to Cubism” (“L’histoire
de ce masque nègre
devient historique à l’heure
actuelle. C’est ce masque
qui a déclenché l’art nègre. . . .
C’est la première pièce
nègre d’où est sorti le movement
sur l’art nègre et qui
a engender le cubisme”).
Letter to Ary Leblond from
April 4, 1944, quoted in
Le Musée vivant, 21, 1956–
57, p. 377.
21 See Maurice de
Vlaminck, “Portraits avant
décès” (1943), in Le Tournant
dangereux (Versailles: sVo
Art, 2008), pp. 112–14.
22 “[C]e même étonnement,
cette même sensantion
de profonde humanité.”
Maurice de Vlaminck, “Le
Tournant dangereux” (1929),
in ibid., p. 94.
23 “[L]a mariée, le marié,
la belle-mère, le garçon
d’honneur, le colonial, la
concierge, le croque-mort,
le gendarme.” Ibid.
24 “[A]u-dessus d’un
comptoir de bistrot, entre
des bouteilles de Picon et
de vermouth.” Ibid.
25 “[O]bjective, naïve et
populaire.” Ibid., p. 92.
FROM THE COLONIES
The first mask acquired by Maurice de Vlaminck had been brought
to France from Gabon, the region in the Congo territory (split between
Belgium, France, and Portugal at the Berlin Conference of
1895) that was at the heart of the scandals linked to the expansion
of the ivory and rubber trade. In 1905, Savorgnan de Brazza was sent
on a fact-finding mission following the murder of a Congolese man
who had been blown up with dynamite in 1903. He discovered forced
labor, arbitrary abuse, women and children who had been taken hostage.
Rubber, too, stained with the blood of the men charged with
harvesting it, had become a source of the most abhorrent violence—
and before long, the rubber trade was mixed up with that of the
objets d’art. It was through the rubber trade, for example, that Paul
Guillaume, whom Jean Cocteau described, not without ironic humor, as
a “négrier” (slave trader),18 started to trade African art in a car workshop
on the Champs-Elysées in around 1911: “African rubber merchants
often brought back ivory sculptures, masks, and wooden statuettes
to sell.”19 But it was before that, in autumn 1905, that Maurice de
Vlaminck bought the famous mask {FIG. 6} that he would later sell to
Derain for twenty francs,20 soon after buying two statuettes in a
bistro in Argenteuil. In his 1929 account of this “discovery” (which he
would retell, in a slightly modified form, in 1943),21 Vlaminck associated
the “two Negro sculptures” with the world of the fair, that
aroused in him “the same astonishment, the same sense of deep
humanity.”22 He describes seeing an “Aunt Sally” (jeu de massacre) at
the fair, featuring “bride, groom, bride’s mother, best man, colonialist,
concierge, undertaker, gendarme.”23 All typical characters, according
to Vlaminck, “morbidly poor and hallucinatingly real”—but he is unable
to buy them, because their creator refuses to sell to him. Vlaminck
then evokes two “Negro sculptures” which he spots “above the
counter in a bistro, between the bottles of Picon and vermouth.”24
Like the Aunt Sally figures, the statuettes belong to a form of representation
that Vlaminck describes as “objective, naïve, and popular.”25
He associates them with an imaginary of geographical and social
margins (the suburbs, the colonies, the working classes),26 and compares
them to the brightly colored popular prints known as the
“Images d’Epinal” and to the trading cards that he remembers collecting
from packets of chicory coffee and copying from the age of
twelve.27 In both cases, the act of purchase and the creation of a
collection constitute a dual process of appropriation and identification:
Vlaminck wanted to create in the same spirit as the fairground
artist or the sculptor of the statuettes, much like Paul Gauguin
who had left Paris some years previously for the world of rural Brittany
and then Tahiti, in search of rupture and renewal. The mask that
Vlaminck repeatedly claimed to have been the first to buy—and which
thanks to him (as he tells it), sparked a revolution in the perception
of art28—probably inspired his 1905 Nu rouge {→ p. 197}. In this painting,
a woman’s red body is reduced to its nudity, confined within the
limits of the frame to bring out its sexual attributes and express the
artist’s desire. Inspired by the plastic solutions offered by a mask
that was not in any way intended to be seen as a portrait (the idea
being not to represent but to embody), Vlaminck has painted a face
26 The imaginary of the
margins is also to be found
in Guillaume Apollinaire’s
poem “Zone” (Alcools, 1913):
“You head for Auteuil you
want to walk home / To sleep
between your fetishes from
Oceania and Guinea” (“Tu
marches vers Auteuil tu veux
aller chez toi à pied / Dormir
parmi tes fétiches d’Océanie
et de Guinée”). Guillaume
Apollinaire, Œuvres poétiques
(Paris: Gallimard,
1975), p. 44.
27 Congratulating himself
on his sagacity, Vlaminck
writes: “It took me a long
time to satisfy myself that I
was not mistaken. . . . Today,
in the glass cabinets of opulent
drawing rooms, I see
the ships of spun glass that
the stallholders used to sell
at suburban fairs. Objects
of admiration, they have been
very delicately, very carefully
positioned and are regarded
as works of art. I am
pleased not to have been
mistaken” (“J’ai été bien longtemps
à acquérir la certitude
que je ne me trompais
pas. . . . Actuellement, dans
les vitrines des salons cossus,
je retrouve des bateaux
en verre filé que les
forains fabriquaient dans
les fêtes de banlieue. Admirés,
ils sont poses délicatement,
avec d’infinies
précautions, et considérés
comme des objets d’art.
Je suis content de ne pas
m’être trompé”). Vlaminck,
“Tournant,” p. 92.
28 Ambroise Vollard had
a bronze cast made of the
mask by the Rudier Foundry
which also made casts for
Auguste Rodin (until 1904)
and Aristide Maillol, among
others. The cast of the mask
is now held in the collections
of the Quai Branly
Museum, inv. 75.14393, fig. 5.
55

74
REPRINTS

“LE SALON D’AUTOMNE”
L’ILLUSTRATION, Nº 3271, NOVEMBER 4, 1905
77
LOUIS VAUXCELLES, “LE SALON D’AUTOMNE”
GIL BLAS, OCTOBER 17, 1905
80
LOUIS VAUXCELLES, “LA VIE ARTISTIQUE”
GIL BLAS, OCTOBER 26, 1905
88
MICHEL PUY, “LES FAUVES”
LA PHALANGE, NOVEMBER 15, 1907
92
GELETT BURGESS, “THE WILD MEN OF PARIS”
THE ARCHITECTURAL RECORD, Nº 140, MAY 1910
102
75

76

77 “LE SALON D’AUTOMNE”

78 L’ILLUSTRATION
NOVEMBER 4, 1905

79 “LE SALON D’AUTOMNE”

CHATOU AND COLLIOURE
In 1900, André Derain and Maurice de Vlaminck became
friends and soon rented a studio together in the Paris suburb
of Chatou, where they had both grown up. They went
on extended excursions together in the surrounding countryside.
Their palette initially remained rather somber.
The artists tried out new possibilities of coloration on the
banks of the Seine; the vegetation of the embankment
seemed particularly suitable for this purpose. From 1901 to
1904, Derain served in the military, but he and Vlaminck
remained in close contact and continued working together
after Derain’s return. The maverick Vlaminck was dismissive
of art institutions and made his living as a street musician,
racing cyclist, and author of tawdry novels, which
Derain illustrated. In the winter of 1904, Matisse visited the
two in Chatou and found that they were pursuing pictorial
strategies similar to his own. The following summer, on
Signac’s recommendation, Matisse’s family traveled to the
remote southern French fishing village of Collioure near
the Spanish border. Derain joined them and worked side by
side with Matisse. Here, they developed a new visual language
centered around the depiction of Mediterranean light.
Derain wrote to Vlaminck from Collioure: “I have two important
points, then, on which my trip has been a great help
to me: first, a new concept of light which consists in the
negation of shade. . . . Secondly, being able . . . to get rid of
anything connected with the division of color.”* Matisse
and Derain developed an impasto, expressive kind of painting
that reconceptualized the relationship between light
and shadow and foreground and background. The landscape
paintings created at Collioure were groundbreaking
for the further development of Fauvism and led to the
Salon scandal of 1905.
* André Derain, letter of July 28, 1905, in Lettres à Vlaminck:
Suivies de la correspondance de guerre, ed. Philippe Dagen
(Paris, 1994).
130

131
MAURICE DE VLAMINCK, Restaurant de la Machine à Bougival, 1905
Oil on canvas, 60 × 81.5 cm

MAURICE DE VLAMINCK, André Derain, 1906
Oil on canvas, 27 × 22.2 cm
MAURICE DE VLAMINCK, Bords de la Seine à Carrières-sur-Seine, 1906
Oil on canvas, 54 × 65 cm
132

ANDRÉ DERAIN, Le vieil arbre, 1904
Oil on canvas, 41 × 33 cm
ANDRÉ DERAIN, Tête de femme, 1904
Oil on wood, 31 × 22 cm
133

ANDRÉ DERAIN, La Rivière, 1904–05
Oil on cardboard, 74 × 90 cm
ANDRÉ DERAIN, Les Vignes au printemps, ca. 1904–05
Oil on canvas, 89.2 × 116.3 cm
134

MAURICE DE VLAMINCK, Sous-bois, 1905
Oil on canvas, 60 × 72 cm
ANDRÉ DERAIN, Autoportrait à la casquette, 1905
Oil on canvas, 33 × 25.5 cm
135