How ‘Fauve’ Are the Hungarian Fauves? Synthesizing Experiments, Alternative Tendencies, 1906–1914
How ‘Fauve’ Are the Hungarian Fauves? Synthesizing Experiments, Alternative Tendencies, 1906–1914

Summary/Abstract: The term “fauve” (“wild” in French) describes the aesthetic sources for the work of a diverse group of Hungarian painters who shuttled between Hungary and Paris at the beginning of the 20th century and were open to experimentation. Their divergent experiments, which otherwise lack cohesion, were only subsequently organized under the appellation fauve. This label, which had described their French contemporaries one hundred years earlier, was applied to the Hungarian painters by art historians on the occasion of the first comprehensive exhibition in 2006, in Budapest. The significant difference is that when French painters showed their work at the Salon d’Autumne, this label was a stigma; now posterity interprets it as a seal of quality. To present a comprehensive and characteristic picture of the essence of the Hungarian Fauve style, it is worth commencing our analysis by comparing it to French Fauvism, pointing out the similarities and significant differences in everything that falls under the category of painterly devices such as colour, contours and line, treatment of space, and perspective. Mine is not an art historical approach. Much rather it endeavours to shed light upon problemsolving experiments from the aspect of painterly practice. In doing so, I will choose the most telling compositions to illustrate these problems, not necessarily the most significant ones.

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