The violence of color

The Fauves, championed by Henri Matisse in 1909, consolidated themselves as a radical movement of the French avant-garde at the beginning of the 20th century, it's true. Perhaps it was a response to an artistic intervention, so to speak, born from a fortunate anecdote. It was the warning of an angry but resoundingly credible critic—Louis Vauxcelles—as he left the 1905 Paris Salon d'Automne. He defended the aggressiveness of pure colors and their function in the resounding narrative of rising painting, the European spread of late Impressionism, also pointing to Matisse as the thundering voice of this bellicose tendency. Quite simply: the beasts. Matisse was seen as the "inventor" of Fauvism, shattering the age-old myth of the solitary artist, rooted in a sequence of clear figurative demands: synthesis, organization, and expression with a faint oriental presence.

Even so, for the French master, forms were mere externalizations of the "intellectual intuition of the sensible world." Although, upon closer inspection, the rhythmic interplay of planes that defines Matisse's constructions denied this risky theoretical interpretation and favored the active emotion that would remake formal creations in the ideal manner of an "other world" with a closed interior structure. This concludes the proposal.

For Matisse, forms were externalizations of the “intellectual intuition of the sensible world.”

However, Matisse's simultaneous portraits of 1905 introduce expressive components into the complex constructive space of the legendary painter that accentuate the intonation: perhaps Georges Braque's La Ciotat , a condensed 1907 canvas with a rather pointillist tracery, demonstrates the creative hesitations of the Fauves, all brilliant colorists, in the hasty qualification of Roger Fry, who lived in a genuine moment. And here Cubism is vaguely outlined, a movement of volumetric commitment in its convictions that imposed its public presence with anti-Fauvist figurative urgency, which Braque's superb landscapes in L'estaque of 1908 would immediately be assimilated by Pablo Picasso in Horta de Sant Joan. "For the Cubists," Daniel-Henry Kahnweiler, always alert, premonitory intuited, "the outside world counted little more than as a fortuitous allusion with no place in Cubist plastic reproduction," as clear as that. And here the belligerent singularity of Cubism curiously takes shape: the formal content and the radically objective must now unite to achieve the balance that culminates in the work of art.

Cubism's open will, as demonstrated by the radical iconography of the time, works on representative space through constructed plans that drive volume, with a strong Cézanne influence, no doubt, and the figurative attempts of early Cubism—that of Fernand Léger, Albert Gleizes, Jean Metzinger—achieved notable public echo through the transparency of this formal refinement, I suggest. Picasso would soon add plastic complexity with Les demoiselles d'Avignon (1907), which insinuates simultaneous vision as a necessary and effective artifice. Cubism accurately points to the decomposition of plastic objects due to their strident formal charge, as aptly visualized by collage and papier collée, following the prominence of the imagination through dynamic objectives that contribute artistic meanings alien to the traditional contents of classical figuration.

Dada is immediate, interventionist like nature, and attempts to put everything in its place.

In plain English, the art object thus unscrupulously challenges the work of art. And voilà, the triumphant revolution of the avant-garde aesthetics of the moment. The "lightning bolts of the plastic revolution" were born, as Hans Richter stated when reconstructing the adventure in 1916. The other nature of art shattered the overflowing fantasies of European art and its -isms, advancing formal initiatives in a visually severe plastic generalization. Dada is immediate, interventionist like nature, and attempts to put everything in its place, in search of a limited meaning through limited means. The natural metamorphosis of art, so to speak. As Walter Benjamin admirably saw, it is about letting the insignificant things of reality—the world of man—speak, shattered by the piercing demands of conflicting plastic art. Aesthetic elaboration is abandoned and the painter is allowed to imagine as he sees fit, in absolute freedom—“Pieces of paper, oilcloth, newspapers,” wrote Guillaume Apollinaire in 1913, perhaps a weighty corrective to the Cubists. La Grande Guerre will put an end to insecurities with fire, at a price we still regret and still overwhelm us. But, in essence, what is art but a front of defiance?