Fauvism was an art movement that developed in France in the early 20th century. Emerging around 1905, it was the first major avant-garde movement of the new century. The style was characterized by the use of intense, non-naturalistic colors and spontaneous, painterly brushwork. Fauvist artists separated color from its traditional descriptive role, instead using it as a primary means of personal expression and structural composition. The movement's core figures were Henri Matisse and André Derain, who, along with artists like Maurice de Vlaminck, developed the style during a summer spent working together in the Mediterranean village of Collioure in 1905.

The term "Fauvism" originated at the 1905 Salon d'Automne in Paris. When the critic Louis Vauxcelles saw the boldly colored canvases of Matisse and his contemporaries exhibited in the same room as a Renaissance-style sculpture, he famously remarked, " Donatello au milieu des fauves " ("Donatello among the wild beasts"). The name " Fauves ," or "wild beasts," was subsequently adopted by the artists themselves. The movement was stylistically indebted to Post-Impressionist painters such as Vincent van Gogh and Paul Gauguin, who had already begun using color with greater emotional freedom. The Fauves pushed this concept further, employing pure, brilliant color applied directly from the paint tube to create a sense of explosion on the canvas. Although the unified movement was short-lived, lasting only until about 1908, its revolutionary use of color had a profound influence on subsequent art movements, particularly German Expressionism and Cubism .

In contrast to Impressionism , which regularly featured light brushstrokes, Fauvism featured thick brushstrokes that created a flat picture made up of fragments of shapes. What appeared in art was simplified forms of real life, which further emphasized art as being upon a flat surface.

Another important aspect of Fauvism was the use of vibrant colors, which were often taken straight from a tube of paint. Colors did not need to correspond to real life; instead, they were based on the artist’s feelings and experiences. This use of color thus emphasized mood. .

In the early 1890s, Henri Matisse and other future fauvists came to the studio of the symbolist painter Gustave Moreau to learn. Here are some of the influential names:

A cyclist, an erotic writer and a violinist in his spare time. He dumped colors onto a canvas as if no tradition had existed before him. His landscapes and portraits defy the logic of reality with resounding fillings, schematic figures and a violence that acted as a counterpoint to the busy study of his friends, who, despite exalting the bright colors they distributed to give them hegemony in their perfect spatial distribution, did not allow nothing random.

He followed a path of his own that did not stray too far from the route traced by Picasso, his future rival, who wouldn´t have come Primitivism that led to Cubism without Derain's advice to visit the Museum of Man. The funny thing is that between 'The bathers', very sculptural, by Derain, and 'Las señoritas de Avignon', by Pablo Picasso, there were only a few months and both did not know what the other was doing.

Braque, who travelled to Paris to get the title of broad brush painter, was one of the last to arrive to the movement and one of the first to walk towards abstraction. Without wanting to, its landscapes became more Cezanian and augured a new course that took shape after 1907, when after another Autumn Salon each of the members of Fauvism took their own journey.

In his beginnings he practiced Realism, with a traditional style and made copies of masters from the Louvre Museum. He was influenced in his painting by Vincent Van Gogh, Paul Gauguin, Persian ceramics, African art and Moorish fabrics. The most characteristic features of Matisse's style are summarized in his personal appreciation of color in relation to the line, in his way of synthesizing figurative elements, in his contempt for the representation of classical space, and in the undulating arabesque rhythm that prints to many of his most characteristic compositions, related to the symbolist painting of his master Moreau and Art Nouveau. His compositions show an exquisite care, he believed that colors should express feelings and convey emotions. "I do not literally paint that table, but the emotion it produces upon me."