The eruption of Fauvism on the French art scene in 1905 has often been compared to the surprise attack of a troop of felines on their inattentive prey. Without warning, a dozen young painters swooped down on the Salon d'Automne, overturning the established order and upsetting the critics. It is to these revolutionaries of modern art that the HELENE BAILLY gallery wishes to pay tribute today with its new exhibition “Lâchez les Fauves!
At the opening of the 1905 Salon d'Automne at the Grand Palais, a scandal shook French art critics.
In Room VII, at the heart of the exhibition, “a jar of paint had just been thrown in the public's face”. The culprits were a few young artists gathered around Henri Matisse, Kees Van Dongen and Maurice de Vlaminck, soon joined by Georges Braque, Émile-Othon Friesz, Louis Valtat and Auguste Chabaud.
This exhibition pays tribute to the few years that changed the history of modern art. The history of the Fauve movement is that of a group of painters who favored their creative freedom to the point of refusing to form a school, of an unusual parenthesis that upset spectators and critics alike, and inspired the greatest artistic innovations of the twentieth century.
With “Lâchez les Fauves!”, galerie HELENE BAILLY celebrates the legacy of this revolutionary movement: radical gesture and freedom of vision.
