A little background: The public disapproval at the Salon d'Automne in 1905 marked the advent of Modernism. The artists who exhibited there were dubbed "fauves," or wild beasts, due to their paintings’ colorful and primitive nature. The term fauve stuck. While the public ridiculed the fauves, several critics were more appreciative, and some young artists found the new works thought-provoking and exciting.
These were paintings on the edge of abstraction. They negotiated new, unstable territory. Fauve pictures stand at the border between pictorial illusion and the kind of "pure paint" that would become a preoccupation of twentieth-century modernism. The saturated colors of fauve paintings were not descriptive of nature. The colors were unblended, without the subtle shading that suggests three-dimensionality.
Fauve painting did not have the concerted and sustained momentum of a coherent movement. The fauve period lasted only a few years, from about 1904 to 1908. The artists, never formally associated, moved on to work in other styles.
Presenting André Derain:
Derain began to paint his first landscapes in 1900, where he attended painting classes that let him to meet Matisse. Throughout his life, he was affected by war. In 1901 to 1904, he was conscripted into the French army. Following his release from service, Derain attended the Académie Julian.
Derain and Matisse worked together through the summer of 1905 in the Mediterranean village of Collioure and later that year displayed their highly innovative paintings at the Salon d'Automne.In March 1906, the noted art dealer Ambroise Vollard sent Derain to London to compose a series of paintings with the city as subject. In 30 paintings, Derain put forth a portrait of London that was radically different from anything done by previous painters of the city. With bold colors and compositions, Derain painted multiple pictures of the Thames and Tower Bridge. These London paintings remain among his most popular work.
In 1907 art dealer Daniel-Henry Kahnweiler purchased Derain's entire studio, granting Derain financial stability. He experimented with stone sculpture and moved to Montmartre to be near his friend Pablo Picasso and other noted artists. Fernande Olivier, Picasso's mistress at the time, described Derain as “Slim, elegant, with a lively colour and enamelled black hair. With an English chic, somewhat striking. Fancy waistcoats, ties in crude colours, red and green. Always a pipe in his mouth, phlegmatic, mocking, cold, an arguer.” At Montmartre, Derain began to shift from the brilliant Fauvist palette to more muted tones, showing the influence of Cubism and Paul Cézanne.
At about this time Derain's work began overtly reflecting his study of the old masters. The role of color was reduced and forms became austere; the years 1911-1914 are sometimes referred to as his gothic period. In 1914 he was mobilized for military service in World War I and until his release in 1919 he would have little time for painting.
After the war, Derain won new acclaim as a leader of the renewed classicism then ascendant. With the wildness of his Fauve years far behind, he was admired as an upholder of tradition. The 1920s marked the height of his success, as he was awarded the Carnegie Prize in 1928 and began to exhibit extensively abroad.
During the German occupation of France in World War II, Derain lived primarily in Paris and was much courted by the Germans because he represented the prestige of French culture. Derain accepted an invitation to make an official visit to Germany in 1941, traveling with other French artists to Berlin to attend an exhibition by Nazi sculptor Arno Brecker. The Nazi propaganda machine naturally made much of Derain's presence in Germany, and after the Liberation he was branded a collaborator and ostracized by many former supporters.
A year before his death, he contracted an eye infection from which he never fully recovered. He died in France in 1954.
-Info from National Gallery of Art and Wikipedia
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