Salon d'Automne 1905 or Orgy of Beasts in Room Number 7
The Art Story #6
Nobody was prepared for what went down in Room 7 that year. Picture Paris, 1905, the Grand Palais. Art lovers wandered into the Salon d'Automne expecting to see the usual delicate landscapes and portraits in calm, respectable tones. Instead, they were blinded with explosions of wild color and messy brushstrokes. This was the birth of Fauvism, and the art world was not ready.
The Salon d'Automne had been set up in 1903 to welcome artists who couldn’t get into the traditional (and famously snooty) salons. But what it got 2 years later instead was an invasion of les fauves—“the wild beasts.” Room 7 had become a riot of bold, unrestrained color, earning it the scandalous label of “a pot of paint flung in the face of the public,” courtesy of one horrified critic. Gathered here were the now-legendary names—Henri Matisse, André Derain, Maurice de Vlaminck—unbothered by the rulebook or public opinion, letting loose their outrageous explosions of emotion on canvas.
These “wild beasts” didn’t paint the way anyone else did. Take Matisse’s Woman with a Hat, for instance: instead of using soft, naturalistic skin tones, Matisse splashed on greens, pinks, and purples like he’d tossed a color wheel into a blender. To critics, it looked as if Matisse and his friends had taken every proper painting convention and hurled it out the window.
The result? Pure scandal. But as history shows, the art world secretly loves a good scandal. Critics were horrified, calling it an "orgy of colors" and accusing the artists of barbarism, yet they simply couldn’t stop talking about the Salon d'Automne. The Fauves’ loud, wild colors and messy lines paved the way for modern art, showing that artists could create purely for the thrill of emotion and bold expression.
The Fauves didn’t last long as a formal group, fading out by 1908. But their influence lingered. After them, art was never quite the same. Color became more than just a tool for realism; it was a force for expressing joy, anger, freedom, and everything in between. Thanks to these beasts' orgy in Room 7, the world of art got a lot wilder—and a whole lot more fun!
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