The Cage of Wild Beasts: How an Insult Became an Art Movement in One Afternoon

Room Seven at the 1905 Salon d'Automne was not large, and by the second week of the show it had become the most reliably crowded space in the Grand Palais, for reasons that had very little to do with admiration. Visitors filed past canvases by Henri Matisse, André Derain, Maurice de Vlaminck, and a handful of their friends, and what they saw was color behaving as if it had never been told the rules. A woman's face carried a stripe of green down the bridge of her nose. A harbor came out in violent orange and cobalt, with no attempt to reproduce the gray-brown Normandy light that was actually sitting outside the museum's windows. Shadows, when they appeared at all, were red or purple rather than the dutiful charcoal that a hundred years of academic training said a shadow ought to be.

None of this was carelessness. Matisse, Derain, and Vlaminck were painting with a fairly precise theory: that color could carry the emotional weight of a picture on its own, without first checking in with observed reality. It was a radical enough idea that most of the viewing public didn't bother to consider it as a theory at all. They considered it an affront, and a fairly funny one, and they said so loudly enough that a critic named Louis Vauxcelles, wandering through the room, found himself reaching for a metaphor. In the middle of these canvases sat a small bronze bust, sculpted in a fairly conventional Renaissance-revival style by an artist named Albert Marque. Vauxcelles looked at the calm, classical little bronze surrounded by all that shouting color and wrote, more or less as an aside, that it was like seeing "Donatello parmi les fauves" — Donatello among the wild beasts.

It was a throwaway line, the kind of thing a reviewer produces on deadline and forgets about by dinner. The Parisian press did not let him forget about it. Within days, "les fauves" had stopped being a joke about one bronze statue's awkward neighbors and had become a label for the painters themselves — Fauvism, the wild beast school, a movement that had not asked to be named and had certainly not asked to be named after an insult aimed at someone else's sculpture. This is worth sitting with for a moment, because it is such a common shape for art history to take: the name that sticks is rarely the one the artists chose. It's the one that got a laugh.

What happened next is the part that tends to get left out of the shorter version of this story, and it's the more interesting part. Ridicule, it turns out, is an excellent marketing device, provided someone with money is paying attention to who's being ridiculed and why. Gertrude and Leo Stein, American expatriates living in Paris with more curiosity than most of their compatriots and considerably more disposable income, bought Matisse's Woman with a Hat directly out of that scandalized room. It was, by most accounts, not a popular purchase at a dinner party. It was also one of the more consequential art acquisitions of the decade. The Steins' salon on the rue de Fleurus became a place where Matisse's paintings could be seen by people who weren't there to laugh, and their patronage effectively insulated the Fauves from the financial consequences of having been declared a menagerie in the national press. French museums would take considerably longer to come around; it was foreign collectors, expatriates, and a handful of far-sighted dealers who kept the wild beasts fed while the establishment caught up.

The movement itself, notably, did not last. By 1908, three years after the scandal, Matisse had already begun modulating his palette toward something calmer, and Derain and Vlaminck were drifting toward other concerns entirely. Cubism was gathering itself in Picasso's studio and would soon eclipse Fauvism as the thing serious people argued about at dinner. Fauvism's entire run as a coherent, shocking, unified project lasted roughly three years — shorter than most gap years, shorter than the lease on the gallery that hosted it.

And yet the pattern set in that one room in 1905 has repeated itself with almost tedious regularity ever since: outrage compresses the usual, slow decades-long process of critical recognition into a single scandalized afternoon. A name meant as ridicule gets adopted, first defensively and then proudly, by the people it was aimed at. The work that caused a small riot ends up, a century later, hanging quietly and expensively in rooms that are trying very hard to look serious and cultured. It is a strange kind of vindication — one that arrives soaked in irony, since the entire mechanism depends on people being furious first and curious second. The wild beasts, tamed by time and reframed in gilt, no longer growl at anyone. They just hang there, radiating a color theory that once got mistaken for an attack on a bronze statue's dignity, and looking, if anything, a little bit pleased with themselves.