Figure 14.12 The Villa Savoye. The house in Poissy was built for the Savoye family in 1931. It encapsulates the Modernist style and expresses Le Corbusier’s five points of architecture.
Modern Art Movements
Les Fauves A group of artists held an exhibition at the Salon d’Automne in 1905. Their work was so brightly coloured that when art critic Louis Vauxcelles saw them in the same room as a small, bronze Renaissance sculpture, he exclaimed, ‘Ah, Donatello chez les fauves!’ – ‘Ah, Donatello among the wild beasts!’ The artists kept the name ‘Les Fauves’, and their style of painting is known as Fauvism as a result.
Fauvist artists were influenced by Paul Gauguin and Vincent van Gogh’s use of colour, and its potential to draw out emotions and sensations.
The movement centred on the vision of Henri Matisse. In the summer of 1905, he and his wife Amélie travelled to the little village of Collioure on the Mediterranean coast of France. The artist was captivated by the colour, light and vitality of the little Catalan fishing port, and persuaded his friend André Derain to join him there.
They spent the summer painting side by side around the coastline. Matisse sometimes painted through open windows, which acted as a frame for the colourful scenes (Fig. 14.13).
CHAPTER 14 20TH-CENTURY ART
Figure 14.13 The Open Window, Collioure, 1905, by Henri Matisse, oil on canvas, 55 × 46 cm, National Gallery of Art, Washington D.C.
203
Derain’s paintings were a little more conventional in but his use of colour was every bit as powerful.
