#Faceless figures painting full#

In some ways, the works were a form of socially acceptable erotica, sold to bourgeois men who didn't dare participate in the lurid night life of Montmartre themselves, but were titillated by scenes of it. This time, says Houbre, the woman 'has a look about her which shows she's no idiot'. Vlaminck, who proudly admitted to painting 'with my heart and my loins', expressed his own virility on canvas in his tawdry depiction of a dancer from the Rat Mort nightclub, while Derain's painting of the same subject, Woman in a Chemise (1906), communicates a sexual tension but is more sympathetic. There's an apparent disdain for the women populating Paris's entertainment district in Maurice de Vlaminck's early portraits, with their overly made-up, clown-like faces – grotesque dolls, it seems, for a man's amusement. Van Dongen's The Hussar (1907), for example, illustrates the financial negotiations between a woman and her client, while Auguste Chabaud's paintings, Houbre tells BBC Culture, 'represent the entirety of the prostitution system' – from luxury hotels to hovels, soldiers to street walkers – with his interest becoming personal when he falls for the ebony-haired Yvette, a sex worker from society's lower echelons. And then there's Alice Bailly, Suzanne Valadon, Sonia Delaunay, Gabriele Münter, Marianne Von Werefkin… Who? Quite. He gives the example of Émilie Charmy, so much more than Charles Camoin's muse, but 'people just actively ignored her work' and Marie Laurencin, sidelined by art history, but painted by Henri Rousseau, and 'clearly part of the aesthetic discourses of the time'. 'The biggest misunderstanding about women in Fauvism is that there were none,' the exhibition's co-curator, Arthur Fink, tells BBC Culture. Matisse, Derain and Friends: The Paris Avantgarde 1904-1908, which opened at the Kunstmuseum Basel on 2 September, hopes to change this, and is believed to be the first gallery to explore the largely unacknowledged role of women in the movement.

#Faceless figures painting full#

Fauvism might have lasted just five years, but this autumn it is back in the limelight with Vertigo of Colour: Matisse, Derain, and the Origins of Fauvism on 13 October at New York's Met, where the Fauves' ground-breaking use of colour takes centre stage and Matisse by Matisse, the largest ever exhibition on the artist, showing first in Beijing (until 15 October) and then Shanghai.īut despite this fervour for Fauvism, art history has not always seen the full picture.