In 1905 there was a great scandal at the Salon d’Automne: Henri Matisse, Maurice de Vlaminck, André Derain, Albert Marquet, Jean Puy and Georges Rouault exhibited together for the first time. Their paintings, mostly landscapes, featured a play of bright colours, unfettered brushwork and formal simplification. Vlaminck showed five works.
Completely shocked by this approach to painting, the critic Louis Vauxcelles called the artists ‘wild animals’ (fauves). The term stuck. The artists had a radically altered understanding of colour in particular. It was no longer a means to reproduce things true to life, but became an independent means of expression. This phenomenon is often described as a ‘frenzy of colour’.
Fauvism is seen today as the first of the European avant-gardes to free itself from academic rules. In Germany the Brücke group of artists had similar aims from 1905 onward. In 1908 fauvism receded in France with the rise of cubism, to which Vlaminck also briefly devoted himself.
