Fauvism is early 20th century movement using violent, non-naturalistic colour.
Fauvism burst onto the Paris art scene at the Salon d'Automne of 1905, when works by Henri Matisse, André Derain, Maurice de Vlaminck and others shocked visitors with their non-naturalistic, explosively saturated colour. A critic called the room containing them a cage of 'fauves' (wild beasts) — the artists kept the name. Fauvism was not a formal theory but a shared practice: colour freed entirely from descriptive function, used instead for its direct emotional effect. Matisse's Woman with a Hat (1905) shows his wife's face painted green, orange and red — not because those were the colours of her complexion but because they expressed something true about the experience of seeing her. Fauvism was brief as a group movement but permanent in its influence: it established that colour could be non-representational while remaining intensely meaningful. The name came from critic Louis Vauxcelles, who, seeing a conventional Renaissance-style sculpture placed among the group's canvases at the 1905 Salon d'Automne, remarked that it looked like 'Donatello among the wild beasts' (fauves). The paintings that provoked the label — Matisse's 'Woman with a Hat,' Derain's views of London and Collioure — used color with no obligation to describe the actual hue of an object: a face could be streaked green and orange, a tree trunk bright red, purely to organize the canvas emotionally and structurally rather than to describe reality. This was the direct inheritance of Van Gogh, Gauguin and the Pointillists' Divisionist theory, pushed to a new extreme of arbitrariness and force. Fauvism was short-lived as an organized group — by 1908 most of its members, including Matisse, had moved toward other approaches — but its central premise, that color could be an independent expressive force rather than a servant of description, became one of the load-bearing ideas of 20th-century painting. It directly enabled German Expressionism's emotionally charged palettes, and Matisse himself spent the following five decades — through his late cut-paper works — continuing to explore exactly how far color alone could carry a composition.