A Wildly Colorful Bunch of Paintings

In this, the darkest of all months, I will focus on the Fauves, (French, English pron. = “foves”), who were wild with color. I do this particularly in view of the current common trend toward painting in this U.S. I find it more than strange that now, when we have so much photographic capability, artists try very hard to make “realistic” images. Some one hundred years ago, the world had some painters who made it very obvious that the images they made were theirs, their very own, and much more emotionally charged than the attempts at photographic realism we see so much of now. Art instructors have a word for it -"painterly." And to be it is, for a painter, a GOOD thing!

In looking for and through sites, I was delighted to find another resource for visual images, CGFA. This stands for Carol Gerten’s Fine Art. Amazingly to me, I had not run across it before. This is one of the terrific advantages to writing on this subject. I get to look for and find all kinds of new information all the time. The Internet is now a wonderful tool for getting us around to museums, collections, and galleries all over the world, and more so all the time.

Here are some links to get you to the Fauves, another group which kind of dove-tailed with and followed the Impressionists. Fauve is French for "deer", originally, and then it became used to mean "wild beast". Not an accolade, but, then, neither was it an accolade to be called an Impressionist, when they were scoffed at by another French art critic. Take that insult and embrace it - a definite revenge! This is what they did.

Henri Matisse, called the (unwitting) founder of the Fauve movement: http://www.european-history.com/matisse.... I recommend that you read this encyclopedic entry, and then take some nice long looks at the representative works put here.

In some of my books, Derain is mentioned as the co-founder with Matisse, but his name is hardly known now.

Here is a link to the Artcyclopedia site that highlights Matisse. http://www.artcyclopedia.com/artists/mat... By the way, Artcyclopedia is another wonderful art resource! Use it often!

N.B.- The BLUE words are active links. Click on those. This is not just a huge list of names!

Even though these images are tiny, they can give us a good idea. Enlarge them, even if they will still be small.

Of course, the ARTchive (Mark Harden) has good things: http://www.artchive.com/ftp_site.htm Once you are there, and see the alphabetized list of artists on the left, scroll down to Matisse. You will find many of the images already shown at other sites here, but additionally, a number of new ones.

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