Les Fauves: A Sourcebook

This bibliography, research guide and sourcebook on the major French Fauve painters (Henri Matisse and Georges Braque are treated in separate Greenwood bio-bibliographies) includes information on 3,120 books and articles, as well as chronologies, biographical sketches, and exhibition lists. Each artist receives a primary and secondary bibliography with many annotated entries. Secondary bibliographies include details about each artist’s life and career, relationships with other artists, work in various media, iconography, and more. Designed for art historians, art students, museum and gallery curators, and art lovers, this volume organises the litertaure surrounding this revolutionary, 20th-century art group. In 1905, the paintings of Matisse, Derain, Vlaminck and their friends shocked conservative museum-goers; hence, the eventual popularity of art critic Louis Vauxcelles’s tag les fauves, or wild beasts by which these artists become known. Although it lasted only three or four years, Fauvism is recognised as the first artistic revolution of international consequence in the 20th century. It was based on the glorification of pure saturated colours and the free expression of primitivism. By the end of 1908, Fauvism collapsed in the face of Cubism, which, moreover, several Fauve artists helped to form.