Update on Fauvism

in the flesh: Sotheby's Co-Chairman of Impressionist & Modern Art Worldwide, David Norman, with Kees Van Dongen's Jeune Arabe

At the Sotheby's Impressionist & Modern Art sale on Tuesday night,

Kees Van Dongen's colorful 1910 canvas Jeune Arabe, easily outsold its estimate of 7-10 million dollars.

It was acquired by an anonymous phone bidder for a surprising $13,802,500.

The overall feeling of the night seemed to reflect the fervor and electricity in the air of former times,

notwithstanding the global economic crisis. The sale netted an incredible total of

$181,760,000 for the auction house, a sum far more comely than that of the

Christie's Impressionist & Modern evening sale held on the same night.

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Go Fauve

the fauvist influence in contemporary fashion shoots

"The function of color should be to serve expression as well as possible.

I put down my tones without a preconceived plan...The expressive aspect of colors

imposes itself on me in a purely instinctive way." (emphasis added)

Thus writes Henri Matisse in his influential 1908 essay, "Notes of a Painter."

Matisse is undoubtedly known as the most prominent member of Fauvism,

perhaps the "sleeper" movement of the early twentieth century avant-garde art landscape in Europe.The fauves, or "wild beasts" in French, comprised a small circle. And unlike their contemporaries in such movements as Futurism and Cubism, they wrote no accompanying manifestos and very little literature to disambiguate their theories on art. By the time "Notes of a Painter" was published,Fauvism, a movement characterized by the bold, unbridled, and "savage" use of color in its canvases, had ironically already faded, lasting a meager two years, 1905-07.

However, there is still much to learn from Matisse and his fellow fauves,

Kees Van Dongen and Maurice de Vlaminck. If Fauvism as a movement was short-lived, its legacy lives on as a catalyst for the major revolutions it instigated in color theory (I refer specifically to Vasily Kandinsky, who coined the term "color theory" in his 1913 treatise, Concerning the Spiritual in Art).

Fauvist-inspired interiors and fashion are lively and sensual,

attracting such words as loud, expressive, sensational,

appealing to a vaguely primitive instinct.

Kees Van Dongen, Maria. The Robert Lehman Collection, at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York.

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