Neo-Fauvism

style mid-1920s France Europe needs review
Core entry — this name passed the citable test and is filed with its sources, but the rich description is still being written (enrichment pass).

Neo-Fauvism was a poetic style of French painting that arose in the mid-1920s around the magazine Cahiers d'Art, launched in 1926. Its writers challenged the Surrealist doctrine of automatism - drawing dictated by the unconscious - by reading the same spontaneous graphic gesture instead as a continuation of traditional artistry, and they cast a group of painters, which they dubbed the Neo-Fauves, as its exponents. The artists themselves were later mostly forgotten, but the campaign had real consequences: it disillusioned the Surrealist group with graphic automatism as a revolutionary route past conventional aesthetics, ideology, and commercialism. Neo-Fauvism has been described as the last trend in painting that could be marketed as a coherent style, closing an era in which movements could be sold as total packages.

Example work related to "Neo-Fauvism".
Example work related to "Neo-Fauvism".Public domain (credit: Henri Matisse) · source

Defining characteristics

  • Spontaneous, automatic graphic marks treated as the product of trained artistry rather than unconscious dictation
  • Poetic, image-led painting that resists manifesto and doctrine
  • A coherent, marketable manner in the Fauvist lineage rather than an avant-garde program

Key figures

  • Christian Zervos (1889-1970) — Founder and editor of Cahiers d'Art (1926), the magazine whose writers defined and promoted the Neo-Fauves
  • André Breton (1896-1966) — Surrealist leader whose automatist doctrine the Neo-Fauves reinterpreted as traditional artistry

Sources

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