Wild Beasts...

Read (skimmed) two books on the Fauves today - one a the formalist, straightforward chronology by John Elderfield and the other an interesting re-reading of the "Wild Beasts" as being more chez Donatello (and thus tradition) than traditionally believed (though the famous original naming of the fauves was indeed that they were chez rather than parmi or contre the more classicizing sculpture also on display at the 1905 Salon d'Automne. This book, Fauve Painting: the Making of Cultural Politics, was extremely insightful and provocative, looking to cultural notions of gendered possession, tourism, national identity in relation to the Latin past and the primitive "other," and the rise of Picasso. If I ever teach the Fauves at length, this will be on the bibliography for sure.

Basically, they weren't as wild and crazy as everyone mythologizes them to be (though they were still pretty cool... sorta), and were very much in dialogue with the past.

This is awesome, because normally my reaction to the Fauves was "yada yada, bright colors, Green Line..." then the gesture of the center-left figure below:




Andre Derain, The Dance, 1906