2023-09-20 15:30:04
„Diane on the Hunt“ by Marie Laurencin von 1908
Source: Estate of the artist/estate of the artist/Musée Marie Laurencin, Tokyo/VG Bild Kunst Bonn, 2023
You have already forgotten the gray cloudy early autumn day when the heavy gate of the Basel Art Museum opens in front of you. You climb two flights of stairs and find yourself in the middle of the blazing late summer. Sea, beach, fishing boats.
People in a state of paradisiacal re-transformation. Eternal light without shadows. Fiery red and blue and yellow. The color is still so bright that you involuntarily squint your eyes. The exhibition is called “Matisse, Derain and their friends”. And it immediately seems as if they had come to collect overripe fruit.
The 20th century was still young, full of expectations, plans and bold decisions. The Parisian friends André Derain and Maurice de Vlaminck were joined by Henri Matisse, who was a few years older and already had experience with the fiery red, blue and yellow.
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Former companions from the École des Beaux-Arts soon joined: Albert Marquet, Henri Manguin, Charles Camoin. And the feature articles wrote about the “Fauves,” the savages who were about to leave no stone of the venerable art building unturned.
Has it ever happened before that painting relied so entirely on the sensual fullness, on the exuberance of the fulfilled moment? It may have been fantastic blindness or clairvoyance only for the sunny side of life: but Matisse, Derain and their friends did not paint anything other than a contented now. At least not back then, when they got together and spent a lot of time together and had no objection when they were called out for being completely out of control.
Later, when the era decided on war, the works all went through dark phases. But now it was important to be open to life, to be happy with a world that had remained the same despite all the destruction of modernity. At least on the fine sandy beaches in Normandy between Honfleur, Trouville and Deauville or in Collioure in southern France, where a hundred and twenty years ago no tourist reserved a berth with striped towels.
„Posters in Trouville“ by Albert Marquet (1906)
Quelle: National Gallery of Art, Washington, Collection of Mr. and Mrs. John Hay Whitney/VG Bild Kunst Bonn, 2023
Was it defiant confidence in happiness? One does not know. The “Fauves” left no manifestos. There is no Fauvist doctrine, no program. Painting should be a color event, nothing else. And so these pictures mark a memorable moment in modern art history, in which the models and regulations had once again become useless and art wanted to start anew à fond, to reinvent itself, so to speak, from its sensory material. Unconditional, inconsiderate, grandiosely meaningless.
Despite all the boldness with which the late Impressionist century had come to an end, painting still followed the old dramaturgy of the world report and remained a final piece in its millennia-old tradition of narrative. Only the pictures of the “Fauves” no longer have anything to tell, they are pure observation, a visual triumph – just as the flowering tree is a visual triumph without having anything to say.
The contented moment
The Mediterranean landscapes, the street scenes, the tranquil indoors, the painter-and-model intimacies, and the nightlife do not become an illustrated report from the early days of the 20th century. Unlike Cézanne’s “Bather”, which seeks to discover a last remnant of lost innocence in the touching futility with which painting in the ancient nymph theme, Matisse’s “Luxe, Calme et Volupté” wants to be nothing more and nothing less than one dappled patch of sunshine in which the naked people on the beach and their picnic under the pine tree do not really authenticate the privileges promised in the enthusiastic picture title.
Everything anecdotal and symbolic seems to be suspended in the contented moment. Perhaps never before or ever since has painting imagined livable life so unhesitatingly.
There must have been a sudden need for such instant art. Fauvist images are suddenly being shown all over Europe. While Derain painted the “Bateaux à Collioure” and Matisse his “Plage rouge”, Kirchner, Heckel, Schmidt-Rottluff and Bleyl joined forces in Dresden to form “Brücke” and began to paint and draw in a “Fauvist” manner. As architecture students, they approach their bold work with even less history than Matisse, who received his first inspiration in Gustave Moreau’s academy class.
Andre Derains „The Dance“ von 1906
Source: ProLitteris, Zurich, 2023/private collection/VG Bild Kunst Bonn, 2023
It was a kind of self-empowerment for an art practice that wanted to “create freedom of life and arms” without any obedience to tradition “in comparison to the well-established older forces,” as the “Brücke” painters propagated it. Anyone who “represents directly and unadulteratedly what compels them to create” is one of them.
The international “Fauves” never met. There was too much jealousy involved. Especially with Kirchner, who steadfastly claimed that he had never seen anything by Matisse, Derain and their friends, let alone been encouraged or influenced by them. Only the Dutchman Kees van Dongen, who exhibited at the Salon d’Automne together with his French colleagues, was also an associated member of the “Brücke”.
It could have been one more major Matisse exhibition, a blockbuster event of the kind that is occasionally needed to improve audience statistics, if the scientific curiosity of the Basel curator team had not visibly won out by repeatedly interrupting the enjoyment route with detailed questions . Who was that one? Who is hiding behind her? Where exactly did this take place? And anyway, what did the unpainted time look like?
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And of course, different questions are of interest today than art history would have asked one or two generations ago. It now seems almost unlikely that the “Fauves” in Paris and Dresden remained purely boy bands. So back to the archives. But with Émilie Charmy, Alice Baily and Guillaume Apollinaire’s friend Marie Laurencin, the female team remains weak.
And it took support from the circle of the “Brücke”-like “Blue Rider” to make the “Fauves” idiom not look so masculine. Gabriele Münter and Marianne von Werefkin have never admitted to Matisse and his brilliant writing, nor have Suzanne Valadon and Sonja Delaunay, but the fact that they are taking part here adds a few more ripe fruits to the harvest. And it also proves that the nervous Fauvist style also allowed for calmer echoes.
An extremely lively exhibition course that takes you room by room to new places and new topics and ultimately leaves you amazed at how historic “Fauves” painting has remained. How it blossomed and never lost its bloom, without infecting the century with its blooming.
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Even when Matisse proclaimed his slogan “Luxe, calme et volupté,” his great and lifelong adversary Picasso was busy with completely different things, celebrating the graceful human fate and beginning his Cubist experiments. Meanwhile, Kandinsky ventured far into abstraction, Robert Delaunay dismantled the Eiffel Tower into shells and logs, and the Futurists in Italy weaponized art.
Matisse, Derain and their friends remained an island, an island of sunshine. It may be that their summer didn’t last long. All the more, her painting has a wonderfully cheerful resistance.
Even if the century that has just begun has long since destroyed all security, and the whirlwind of accelerated things will leave almost no form of existence familiar, then the red and blue and yellow remained on the fine sandy beaches in Normandy or in the south of France Collioure was as fire-colored for a whole season as they truthfully painted it. And when the heavy gate of the Basel Art Museum closes behind you, then the gray early autumn clouds have also disappeared.
Matisse, Derain and their friends. The Parisian avant-garde 1904-1908. Until January 21, 2024 at the Kunstmuseum Basel
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