Fauvism and Expressionism: colour off the leash

Somewhere around 1905, in two countries at once, painters stopped asking what colour a thing was. Until then, even the most liberated brush — Van Gogh’s, Gauguin’s — had been arguing about how far you could push the colour of a wheatfield or a Breton hillside before it stopped being that thing. After 1905 the question changes. Colour becomes a material you deploy for effect, and the local colour of the object is simply one option among many.

That single shift produced two bodies of work that look superficially identical and mean opposite things. Learning to separate them is one of the highest-value discriminations in modern painting, because a quarter of the unfamiliar canvases you will be shown from the period 1905–20 are one or the other.

Fauvism: violence in the pigment, calm in the mood

At the Salon d’Automne of 1905 a room of paintings by Henri Matisse, André Derain, Maurice de Vlaminck and others hung around a decorous Renaissance-style bust. The critic Louis Vauxcelles said it was like seeing Donatello among the wild beasts — les fauves — and the name stuck. (Vauxcelles had a gift for this; three years later a remark of his about “little cubes” named Cubism.)

What is actually in a Fauve picture?

Colour severed from description. Matisse’s Portrait of Madame Matisse (1905), universally called The Green Stripe, runs a band of green down the middle of his wife’s face. The green is there because the picture needs a cool division between a warm half and a cold half, not because anything in the room was green. Derain’s Thames pictures of 1906 give you a pink Charing Cross Bridge over orange water.

Paint often straight from the tube, in broad separate strokes, laid on thinly enough that bare white priming glints between them. This is why Fauve canvases look aerated and luminous rather than heavy: the white ground is doing half the work.

Flat, shallow space. Modelling is abandoned; a figure is a flat patch bounded by a fluid line. Deep recession is refused. Matisse’s Le Bonheur de vivre (1905–06) is a meadow of unshaded colour with dancing figures drawn as single continuous curves.

And a subject drawn entirely from pleasure: harbours at Collioure, bathers, balconies over the sea, odalisques, dancers, fruit on a cloth. Matisse wrote in his Notes of a Painter (1908) that he dreamed of an art of balance and serenity, something like a good armchair. The brutality is entirely in the pigment. The mood is a holiday.

Fauvism is also mercifully short. As a movement it runs about 1905 to 1908. Braque left for Cubism, Derain turned to a sombre neo-classicism, Vlaminck darkened. Only Matisse carried the colour forward, which is why half the pictures you will be shown as “Fauve” are actually Matisse of 1911 (The Red Studio) or 1930 or 1952.

German Expressionism: the same freedom, used to accuse

In Dresden, also in 1905, four architecture students — Ernst Ludwig Kirchner, Erich Heckel, Karl Schmidt-Rottluff and Fritz Bleyl — founded Die Brücke, “The Bridge”, a bridge from the present to whatever came next. They lived communally, drew from the nude continuously, holidayed at the Moritzburg lakes, and revived the woodcut: a block gouged with a knife, printed hard black on white.

That is the crucial technical fact, because the woodcut infects the painting. A Brücke picture is drawn in wedges. The strokes are hatched and angular, the contours hacked rather than curved, the colours divided by scored black lines. When the group moved to Berlin in 1911 the subject turned urban and the forms sharpened further. Kirchner’s Street, Berlin (1913) and Potsdamer Platz (1914) tilt the pavement up towards you, elongate the cocottes into feathered spikes, and set acid pink against bilious green. Nothing in it is relaxing.

Der Blaue Reiter, formed in Munich in 1911 around Wassily Kandinsky and Franz Marc, is the other half of German Expressionism and has an entirely different temperature. It was an almanac and a loose association rather than a brotherhood. Its preoccupations are spiritual: Kandinsky’s Concerning the Spiritual in Art (1911) argues that colour affects the soul as directly as music, and by 1913 his Compositions have shed the visible world altogether. Marc paints blue horses and red deer as emblems of an innocence humans have forfeited, set in faceted crystalline landscapes. August Macke’s colour is sweeter still. Where Die Brücke is nervous, Der Blaue Reiter is exalted.

Vienna supplies a third strain: Egon Schiele and Oskar Kokoschka. Schiele’s tell is unmistakable — the emaciated body with clawed hands stranded on blank paper, no setting whatsoever, contour scratched rather than drawn.

The precursors, and why Munch matters

German Expressionism did not invent its vocabulary. Edvard Munch showed in Berlin in 1892; the scandal closed the exhibition early and split the Berlin art world. His Frieze of Life pictures — The Scream (1893), The Sick Child, Jealousy — supply the whole grammar: the long undulating contour that dissolves a figure into its landscape, the plunging diagonal of a jetty or a road, greens the colour of illness, and subject matter taken from anxiety, sex and death.

Van Gogh supplies the loaded impasto and the emotional colour; Gauguin supplies the flat outlined patch; James Ensor supplies the mask. All four feed both movements — which is precisely why colour alone will not separate them.

Telling them apart

The one-line version: Fauve colour decorates; Expressionist colour accuses. If the picture makes you want to go on holiday, it is French. If it makes you want to go home, it is German.

The traps

Kandinsky’s Murnau years. The Bavarian landscapes of 1908–10 by Kandinsky and Gabriele Münter have flat magenta churches and cobalt hills and look thoroughly Fauve. The tells: the light is unearthly rather than Mediterranean, the horizon tilts, and the forms are already sliding towards signs.

Rouault. Georges Rouault exhibited with the Fauves but paints black-outlined judges, clowns and prostitutes in a stained-glass glow. Temperamentally he belongs with the Germans.

The lower-case word. “Expressionist” is also used loosely for any distortion in the service of feeling, which drags in Grünewald, El Greco and much of the twentieth century. If a question says Expressionism without qualification, assume Germany, 1905–25.

Long careers. Derain after 1911 paints sombre figures that look almost seventeenth-century. Matisse’s 1914 French Window at Collioure is nearly a black abstraction. Movements end; painters do not.

Neue Sachlichkeit. After 1918, Otto Dix and George Grosz keep the savagery but swap the wedges for hard-edged, bitterly precise realism. Cruelty plus draughtsmanship plus Weimar subject matter means the 1920s, not Die Brücke.

How to spot it in ten seconds

1. Is the colour describing the object? If no — a green face, a pink bridge — you are in this territory at all. If yes, you are probably earlier, or in Post-Impressionism.
2. Look at the edges, not the hues. Curved, flowing, relaxed contours point to France. Angular, splintered, wedge-cut contours point to Germany.
3. Check the ground. Bare white canvas showing through thin strokes is Fauve. Dense covering with scored black outlines is Brücke.
4. Name the subject. Harbour, beach, dancer, odalisque, fruit — Fauve. Street, brothel, cabaret, soldier, self-portrait — Expressionist.
5. Read the mood of the faces. Blank and calm, France. Mask-like and staring, Germany.
6. If it is German, which group? Urban, jagged, sexual, Dresden-then-Berlin — Die Brücke. Animals, mysticism, dissolving into abstraction, Munich — Der Blaue Reiter.
7. If the body sits on blank paper with no setting, think Vienna: Schiele or Kokoschka.
8. If the contour undulates and everything is green-sick, check for the 1890s: this may be Munch, the ancestor rather than a member.
9. Date the Fauve candidates tightly. The movement is 1905–08. Anything later and flatter with the same colour is most likely Matisse alone.
10. Ask whether the savagery is in the paint or the drawing. Paint only, with calm drawing, is French. Savagery in both is German.