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Term first used in 1941 by the Belgian critic Paul Fierens to describe the style of painting of an informal group of artists active in and around Brussels (Brabant province), c. 1910–23. Its founder-members included Fernand Schirren, Louis Thévenet, Willem Paerels (1878–1962), Charles Dehoy and Auguste Oleffe, who had already been grouped together in Le Labeur art society, founded in 1898. When, in 1906, Oleffe moved to Auderghem, his house became an established meeting-place, and Edgard Tytgat, Jean Brusselmans, Anne-Pierre de Kat (1881–1968) and the most prominent member of the group Rik Wouters became associated. The first exhibition of the work of those who were later called the Brabant Fauvists was held at the Galerie Giroux in Brussels in 1912. Inspired by a variety of directions within Impressionism, the group rejected Symbolism and was heavily influenced by James Ensor. They sought to express themselves through a clear visual language, with pure glowing colours and precise composition. They chose simple subjects, such as still-lifes, harmonious landscapes and scenes from everyday life executed in a painterly manner with spontaneous, expressive brushstrokes, for example ...

(b Argenteuil-sur-Seine, Seine-et-Oise, May 13, 1882; d Paris, Aug 31, 1963).

French painter, collagist, draughtsman, printmaker and sculptor. His most important contribution to the history of art was his role in the development of what became known as Cubism. In this Braque’s work is intertwined with that of his collaborator Pablo Picasso, especially from 1908 to 1912. For a long time it was impossible to distinguish their respective contributions to Cubism, for example in the development of Collage, while Picasso’s fame and notoriety overshadowed the quiet life of Braque.

His family moved in 1890 to Le Havre, where his father had a painting and decorating business. In 1897 Braque entered the municipal art school, where he met and became friendly with Othon Friesz and Raoul Dufy. He joined them in Paris at the turn of the century and, after a year of army service, settled in Montmartre in 1902. He began to visit the Musée du Louvre, where he encountered van Gogh’s work, and that October he began to study at the Académie Humbert, where his fellow students included Francis Picabia and Marie Laurencin. The following year he studied briefly with ...

(b Marseille, Sept 23, 1879; d Paris, May 20, 1965).

French painter. After the death of his father, he was brought up by his mother alone, whose endless travels seem to have affected his studies. At 16 he simultaneously enrolled at the Ecole des Beaux-Arts, Marseille, which he attended in the morning, and at the Ecole de Commerce. After winning a prize for drawing, he was encouraged by his mother to enter Gustave Moreau’s studio at the Ecole des Beaux-Arts in Paris, which he did in May 1898, shortly before Moreau’s death. Although he barely had time to derive any benefit from Moreau’s teaching, he formed several lasting friendships among fellow students later associated with Fauvism: Manguin, Puy, Rouault, Matisse and especially Marquet, with whose work his own shows marked affinities.

After Moreau’s death, when Camoin’s fellow students enrolled in other studios or private art schools, he worked alone or else with Marquet in the streets of Paris during the few hours that Marquet was not at the Académie Carrière. Camoin’s portrait of ...

(b Florence, Oct 16, 1900; d Fiesole, Nov 13, 1988).

Italian painter. A child prodigy, he published music and exhibited paintings at the age of 13, and met Umberto Boccioni and Ardengo Soffici. He produced Fauvist works (e.g. Self-portrait in a Bathing Robe, 1915; Fiesole, Fond. Primo Conti) before forming a wartime Florentine Futurist group with Achille Lega (1899–1934) and Ottone Rosai. His dynamic paintings, such as Refugees at the Station (1918; Fiesole, Fond. Primo Conti), coincided with contributions to L’Italia futurista, of which he became editor before being called up in 1918. After World War I, Conti’s shifting interests were reflected in his periodicals Il centone (1919; edited with Corrado Pavolini (b 1898)) and L’enciclopedia (1920–23). He met Filippo de Pisis and developed a mysterious realism influenced by Pittura Metafisica, although it was the contemporary treatment of his Rape of the Sabines (1925; priv. col.; see 1980–81 exh. cat., p. 179) that caused controversy at the Rome Biennale of ...

(b Bulle, Switzerland, April 24, 1878; d Paris, Jan 30, 1958).

French painter of Swiss birth. From 1901 he spent almost all his life in Paris, studying there at the Académie Julian. His early work was influenced first by Impressionism, then by Fauvism and Art Nouveau, and included a number of rhythmically stylized female heads in pastel colours, followed from c. 1910 by a more strongly constructed Cubist phase. He spent two years in New York (1914–16), where he met (Henri-Robert-)Marcel Duchamp—whose sister Suzanne Duchamp he married in 1919—and Francis Picabia, and became involved in the Dada movement until 1921; his Dada paintings and reliefs are delicate and poetic and often combine the forms of objects, such as mechanical instruments, with words and typography, as in his portrait of Thomas Edison (1920; London, Tate).

In the 1920s, seeking to create a visionary art that would transport the artist and viewer into unknown worlds expressive of the aspirations of the soul, Crotti began to produce pictures in a variety of styles, sometimes completely abstract, like ...

(b Chatou, nr Paris, June 17, 1880; d Garches, Sept 8, 1954).

French painter, sculptor, illustrator, stage designer and collector. He was a leading exponent of Fauvism. In early 1908 he destroyed most of his work to concentrate on tightly constructed landscape paintings, which were a subtle investigation of the work of Cézanne. After World War I his work became more classical, influenced by the work of such artists as Camille Corot. In his sculpture he drew upon his knowledge and collection of non-Western art.

Derain abandoned his engineering studies in 1898 to become a painter and attended the Académie Carrière. He also sketched in the Musée du Louvre and painted on the banks of the Seine. On a visit to the Louvre in 1899 he met the painter Georges Florentin Linaret (1878–1905), who had been his companion at school, and who was copying Uccello in an extraordinary manner; he was studying under Gustave Moreau and later introduced Derain to a fellow pupil, Henri Matisse. Derain’s painting was already influenced by the work of Cézanne, and in ...

(b Gravesend, Kent, 1885; d London, Aug 29, 1939).

English painter and illustrator. She studied at the Slade School, London, in 1902–3, then trained under Max Bohm at Etaples and in 1910–13 at La Palette, Paris, under Jean Metzinger, John Duncan Fergusson and Dunoyer de Segonzac. As a result she developed a Fauvist style using rich impastos. She contributed several brusquely simplified illustrations to Rhythm magazine during 1911 and exhibited Fauvist canvases at the Allied Artists’ Association in 1912 and 1913. She exhibited with S. J. Peploe and Fergusson at the Stafford Gallery in 1912, but an encounter with Wyndham Lewis the following year led to a dramatic change in her work. By spring 1914 she had become an enthusiastic member of the Rebel Art Centre, and her name appeared on the list of signatures at the end of the Vorticist manifesto in the first issue of Blast magazine (1914).

Little survives of Dismorr’s Vorticist work, but her illustrations in ...

(b Delfshaven, nr Rotterdam, Jan 26, 1877; d Monte Carlo, May 28, 1968).

French painter and printmaker of Dutch birth. He took evening classes in geometric drawing from 1892 to 1897 at the Akademie voor Beeldende Kunsten in Rotterdam. In 1895 he began working intermittently for the newspaper Rotterdamsche Nieuwsblad, for which he made, among other things, a series of bright watercolour drawings of Rotterdam’s red-light district and illustrations of Queen Wilhelmina’s coronation. Van Dongen’s first paintings used dark tones in imitation of Rembrandt, who remained the most important model for his work; his later book on Rembrandt was, in fact, a projection of his own life. By the mid-1890s he was using more vivid contrasts of black and white, for example in Spotted Chimera (1895; priv. col., see Chaumeil, pl. 1), his palette soon becoming brighter and his line more animated. In Le Muet Windmill (1896; priv. col., see Chaumeil, pl. 7), a red ochre monochrome painting, he successfully enlivened the colour by means of broad, energetic brushstrokes....

(b Le Havre, June 3, 1877; d Forcalquier, Basses-Alpes, March 23, 1953).

French painter, printmaker and decorative artist. From the age of 14 he was employed as a book-keeper, but at the same time he developed his innate gift for drawing at evening classes at the Ecole des Beaux-Arts in Le Havre,given by the Neo-classical painter Charles Lhuillier (?1824–98). He discovered the work of Eugène Boudin, Poussin and Delacroix, whose Justice of Trajan (1840; Rouen, Mus. B.-A.) was ‘a revelation and certainly one of the most violent impressions’ of his life (Lassaigne, Eng. trans., p. 16). In 1900, with a grant from Le Havre, he joined his friend Othon Friesz in Paris and enrolled at the Ecole Nationale Supérieure des Beaux-Arts in the studio of Léon Bonnat. At the Musée du Louvre he studied the art of Claude Lorrain, to whom he painted several Homages between 1927 and 1947 (e.g. 1927; Nice, Mus. Masséna). His encounter with works by van Gogh at the Galerie Bernheim-Jeune and with Impressionism at Durand-Ruel is reflected in such early works as ...

Movement in French painting from c. 1898 to 1906 characterized by a violence of colours, often applied unmixed from commercially produced tubes of paint in broad flat areas, by a spontaneity and even roughness of execution and by a bold sense of surface design. It was the first of a succession of avant-garde movements in 20th-century art and was influential on near-contemporary and later trends such as Expressionism, Orphism and the development of abstract art.

The term derives from the word ‘fauves’, used in a review by the critic Louis Vauxcelles (Gil Blas, 17 Oct 1905) of the room at the 1905 Salon d’Automne where the incongruity of an Italianate bust by Albert Marque, portrait of Jean Baignères (1905; France, priv. col.; see 1976 exh. cat., p. 44), surrounded by exuberantly coloured paintings by Henri Matisse, André Derain, Maurice de Vlaminck and others seemed to him like placing ‘Donatello parmi les fauves’. As with other names of 20th-century movements, the label was thus pejorative in origin, in this case reflecting not only violently hostile critical reaction but also the incomprehension of the general public. Nevertheless, the painters to whom it was applied, not a consciously defined group but a loose association linked in certain cases by friendship, defiantly accepted the term as one appropriate to the violence with which they overturned academic conventions....

(b Le Havre, Feb 6, 1879; d Paris, Jan 10, 1949).

French painter. He began his training in Le Havre in 1896 under the enlightened teaching of the French painter Charles Lhuillier (1824–99) and continued in Paris under Léon Bonnat until 1904 at the Ecole des Beaux-Arts. In 1903, however, he decided against an academic career and started showing his work at the Salon des Indépendants and, from 1904, at the Salon d’Automne. At this stage he was working in an Impressionist style (for illustration see Le Havre). Following the emergence of Fauvism at the infamous Salon d’Automne of 1905 and a painting trip with Georges Braque to Antwerp in 1906, he adopted the bright, anti-naturalistic palette of the Fauves, for example in his Fernand Fleuret (1907; Paris, Pompidou). He became closely associated with Matisse, renting a studio in the same building as him in Paris from 1905 to 1908. In the summer of 1907, however, painting with Braque in La Ciotat, in the Midi, Friesz began to turn to the example of Cézanne, seeking to emphasize a strong sense of pictorial construction that he felt had been sacrificed to Fauvism’s colouristic excesses. The Arcadian subject-matter of much of his subsequent work up to ...

(Hirsche)

(b Stockholm, Sept 2, 1888; d nr Oslo, May 22, 1946).

Swedish painter, stage designer and teacher. He studied at the Konstnärförbund school in Stockholm (1905–8), then travelled to Paris and studied at Matisse’s school (1908–11). He was a member of the Young Ones group. In 1911 he married Sigrid Hjertén. Grünewald was greatly influenced by Matisse between 1910 and 1920, and Fauvism was generally important to him. His prize-winning design (1912–14) for decorating the Register Office of Stockholm Town Hall was purely Fauvist, and he was forbidden to execute the project. This French influence can be seen in Ivan in the Armchair (1915; Stockholm, Mod. Mus.). Cézanne’s paintings also had an early significance for him. In 1915 he exhibited together with his wife at the Sturm-Galerie in Berlin. Grünewald carried out the first of many stage designs for a production of Samson and Delilah at the Kungliga Teater, Stockholm, in 1921. He was a sought-after decorator during the 1920s and worked in a classical spirit. He was also an able portrait painter and illustrator, e.g. ...

(b Belostok, Russia [now Białystok, Poland], Dec 25, 1884; d Detroit, MI, April 5, 1930).

American painter of Russian birth. Halpert arrived in New York City as a child in 1889 and grew up on the Lower East Side with other Eastern European Jewish immigrants. He spent most of his life studying independently and working in New York City and Paris. He was married to Edith Gregor Halpert, owner and director of Downtown Gallery, which played a major role in the rise of modern art in the United States.

Halpert’s artistic training began in 1899 with studying and working for his tuition at the Educational Alliance and National Academy of Design, where he met his first artistic mentors Jacob Epstein, Henry McBride (1867–1962) and J. Carroll Beckwith (1852–1917). In 1902 he made his first visit to Paris, sponsored with funds raised by Beckwith, staying until 1905 and studying first at the Ecole des Beaux-Arts then at the less restrictive Académie Julian. He ultimately left the structured learning environment all together to learn independently from contemporary artists working in Paris, such as the Impressionists ...

(b Kyoto, May 6, 1928).

Japanese painter. After graduating from Musashi High School he painted impastoed figurative works in a Fauvist style. He went to France in 1952 and in 1955 met the French critic Michel Tapié (1909–87). His style underwent a dramatic change to Art informel. His paintings in the late 1950s were aggressively and intensely textured, with vivid colours of red, yellow and black, and a fierce sense of vibration over the entire pictorial surface. However, the grounds of the paintings had the serenely beautiful texture of Chinese porcelain. This East Asian sensibility confirmed Imai’s importance for the Art informel artists, who were searching for an alternative aesthetic to that of Western modernity. Imai was also an influential activist and after visiting Japan in 1957 with Tapié, Sam Francis and Georges Mathieu, helped to arouse interest in Art informel in Japan. His flamboyant gestural paintings of the 1960s were mainly red, with thickly applied paint and dripping lines running in spiral and radial directions. From the 1970s he moved between Japan and Paris. He began to include words in his ...

(b Paris, March 23, 1874; d St Tropez, Sept 25, 1949).

French painter. He studied under Gustave Moreau at the Ecole des Beaux-Arts in Paris from late 1894, befriending his fellow students Albert Marquet, Henri Matisse, Jean Puy and Georges Rouault, who were among those later to be labelled the Fauves (see Fauvism) when they exhibited together at the Salon d’Automne in 1905. Manguin’s Nude in the Studio (1903; Canada, priv. col., see L. Manguin and C. Manguin, p. 67), in its rejection of local colour, conspicuously broken brushstroke and subversion of traditional perspective, is an early example of his Fauvist style, which was considerably less revolutionary than that of Matisse or Maurice de Vlaminck. The picture is, however, given a personal twist by Manguin’s unusual framing devices and ambiguous space, for example in his use of a theoretically impossible reflection in a mirror to produce a picture within a picture. The disjunction that was noted at the time by Guillaume Apollinaire between Manguin’s use of heightened, unnaturalistic colour and straightforward, almost academic drawing style is evident in a ...

(b Budapest, Nov 30, 1878; d Budapest, Dec 3, 1959).

Hungarian painter. He studied in Paris at the Académie Julian and the Ecole des Beaux-Arts between 1902 and 1904. In 1906 he exhibited at the Salon d’Automne. He was influenced by Fauvism and especially by Matisse. In 1907 he returned to Hungary, where he became a member of Eight, the and exhibited with them from 1909 until they disbanded in 1912. During this period his paintings emphasize the structural components of the composition. In certain pictures, for example the Old Customs at Vác (c. 1910; Budapest, N.G.), thick contours delimit balanced forms; in others (e.g. Constructivist Self-portrait, c. 1914; Budapest, N.G.), the same contours become lines of force dividing the composition into turbulent surfaces. The early paintings Forest Path and Green Room (both 1910; Budapest, N.G.) show the influence of both Cézanne and van Gogh, respectively. From 1919 Márffy responded to Post-Impressionism and the Ecole de Paris, developing his own style only in the 1930s, when he abandoned painting from direct observation. He used sensuous opal colours that blur the content, but he retained a strict compositional formula, as in ...

(b Bordeaux, March 26, 1875; d Paris, June 14, 1947).

French painter and draughtsman. In 1890 he was taken by his family to live in Paris so that he could study drawing at the Ecole Nationale Supérieure des Arts Décoratifs. There he met Henri Matisse, with whom he formed a lasting friendship and with whom he studied from 1894 to 1898 at the Ecole des Beaux-Arts under Gustave Moreau. In the Louvre, Marquet made copies after Poussin, Velázquez, Claude Lorrain and particularly Chardin, of whose House of Cards he produced copies in 1894 and 1904 (Montmédy, Mus. Bastien-Lepage, holds what is considered the later of the two).

Tentative early works by Marquet such as Portrait of the Artist’s Mother (1894; San Francisco, priv. col., see 1988 exh. cat., no. 1), suggesting the influence of Fantin-Latour, were soon succeeded by landscape paintings such as Parisian Suburb (1897; Besançon, Mus. B.-A. & Archéol.), in which he began to simplify the subject into broad areas of colour. ...

(Emile Benoît)

(b Le Cateau-Cambrésis [now Le Cateau], nr Cambrai, Picardy, Dec 31, 1869; d Nice, Nov 3, 1954).

French painter, draughtsman, sculptor, printmaker, designer and writer. He came to art comparatively late in life and made his reputation as the principal protagonist of Fauvism, the first avant-garde movement at the turn of the century. He went on to develop a monumental decorative art, which was innovative both in its treatment of the human figure and in the constructive and expressive role accorded to colour. His long career culminated in a highly original series of works made of paper cut-outs, which confirmed his reputation, with Picasso, as one of the major artists of the 20th century.

Matisse was born in his grandparents’ home and grew up in the neighbouring village of Bohain-en-Vermandois, where his father’s general store had developed into a grain business. He worked first as a solicitor’s clerk in the local town of Saint-Quentin before taking a degree in law in Paris from October 1887 to August 1889, without apparently showing the slightest interest in art; on returning home he resumed work as a solicitor’s clerk. Bored by the routine of office life, he attended drawing classes at the Ecole Quentin Latour before going to work....

[Chin.: “New Year pictures”]

Genre of popular woodblock prints known for their bold colors and folkloric content. Prior to the mid-20th century these prints were widely used throughout China to decorate the home, as calendars, and to conduct domestic rituals in advance of the lunar New Year festival.

The most common production method for nianhua uses three to five relief printing blocks. In this technique an outline block is used to print an image in monochrome, and additional blocks are then used to apply individual colors. Finally the prints may be touched up by hand. In some examples all colors are applied using brushes. The subject matter of nianhua is diverse. Although the variety of gods appearing in nianhua is virtually unlimited, domestic deities such as the Stove God, Door God, and the God of Wealth are common. The image of the Stove God in particular was believed to embody the deity and protect the household. The act of burning the print at the end of the year was traditionally intended to send the deity to Heaven, and its subsequent replacement was to welcome him back to the home. Themes of wealth, good fortune, and scholarly success leading to official promotion are popular, as are images relating to fertility and the birth of male children. Narratives scenes drawn from historical classics and the theater are among the most widely produced items in the genre. More rarely, ...

Term applied to the reaction against Impressionism led by Paul Cézanne, Paul Gauguin, Vincent van Gogh, and Georges Seurat. It can be roughly dated from 1886, the year of the last Impressionist exhibition, to c. 1905, when Fauvism appeared and the first moves towards Cubism were made. While it was predominantly a French movement, there were related developments in other countries, which often occurred somewhat later. Post-Impressionism can be loosely defined as a rejection of the Impressionists’ concern for the naturalistic depiction of light and colour in favour of an emphasis on abstract qualities or symbolic content. It therefore includes Neo-Impressionism, Symbolism, Cloisonnism, Synthetism, and the later work of some Impressionists. The term was coined in 1910 by the English critic and painter Roger Fry for an exhibition of late 19th-century French painting, drawing, and sculpture that he organized at the Grafton Galleries in London.

After considering more substantive terms such as ‘expressionism’, Fry settled on ‘Post-Impressionism’ for the title of the exhibition at the Grafton Galleries in ...