Critic louis vauxcelles biography

Amélie Parayre married Henri Matisse in January 1898. Part of her family came from Corsica. Since Henri’s career wasn’t going too well in freezing Paris, they spent their honeymoon in sunny Corsica. For Matisse it was work as usual. He produced fifty-five paintings in those five months. What’s important is not the prodigious output, but that he GOT COLOR: “Soon there came to me, like a revelation, the love of materials for their own sake. I felt growing within me a passion for color.”
Well, you might say, he was twenty-eight, what took him so long? We take it for granted that not only painting but our daily lives are filled with color and we assume that it was ever thus. The sky’s been blue, the grass green and flowers in flowery colors since the dinosaurs. That’s true, but cloth for clothing and furnishings was dreary and drab until very recently, specifically the second half of the 19th century, when analine dyes were invented. Prior to that only king and gods could afford color. Everyone else slogged around in browns and grays.
We can see this reflected in the illumination

Louis Vauxcelles (1870-1943)

 

How Fauvism Got Its Name

Born in Paris, Vauxcelles was, by 1900, one of the most widely read art critics in France, whose articles on painting and sculpture appeared regularly in several different newspapers and journals - notably Gil Blas and Excelsior. Despite his opposition to both Fauvism and Cubism, he was not known for having conservative views. True, he disliked abstract art, which was becoming more prevalent, but he was equally ill-disposed towards the academic art of the official Paris Salon. He had originally made the comment "Donatello parmi les fauves" when talking with Matisse himself, and had liked it so much that he repeated it later in his written review for Gil Blas.

See also: History of Expressionist Painting (1880-1930). To see fauvism in context, see: Expressionist Movement (1880s on).

As it was, Fauvist painters were delighted with the scandal attaching to the new name that Vauxcelles had bestowed upon them. By dubbing them "wild beasts", Vauxcelles plucked them from obscurity and made

Full Name: Vauxcelles, Louis

Other Names:

Gender: male

Date Born: 01 January 1870

Date Died: 1943

Place Born: Paris, Île-de-France, France

Home Country/ies: France

Subject Area(s): Cubist, Fauvre, Modern (style or period), and twentieth century (dates CE)

Career(s): art critics


Overview

Art critic of the early 20th-century modernist art movements; coiner of the terms “Fauvism” and “Cubism”. Vauxcelles started writing art criticism in the 1890s, rising to a major figure (and today, documenter) of the art world in Paris. In a 1905 review, Vauxcelles disparagingly described the proto-expressionist French painters around Andre Darin and Henri Matisse, whose work was exhibited among classical sculpture, as “Donatello parmi les fauves” (a Donatello amongst wild beasts). The term “les fauves” (wild beasts) became the epithet for the movement. Likewise in 1908 he described the work of Braque as “bizarre cubiques” (bizarre cubes). Vauxcelles’ description of their work as ‘full of little cub

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