By Eric S. Shi, 26-Aug-2021, updated 2-Nov-2021.
Fauvism is a school of fine art, developed by a group of avant-garde artists, whose works emphasized connotation and quality of color over the representational or realistic values stressed by all traditional paintings before it.
The group gained their reputation as Fauves after Louis Vauxcelles, a French art critic, belittled their exhibition of unconventional artworks, at the 1905 Salon d'Automne, as "Donatello chez les fauves" ("Donatello among the wild beasts").
The paintings of Fauves can be characterized by dazzling colors and wild brush works, while the subject matters are typically stripped to bare minimums. Some art historians compare Fauvism with Expressionism, both in its use of pure color and in its unconstrained brushwork. Others find their root in Pointillism, yet others in Divisionism.
H. Matisse's painting, "Luxury, Calm and Pleasure", as in Figure 1, is probably an easy start point for the general public to understand Fauvism. This is not only because of the indisputable contributions of Matisse towards shaping up Fauvism but also because many of the Fauve characteristics first cohered in this work.
Figure 1 Henri Matisse, “Luxe, Calme et Volupté” 1904, source: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Luxe,_Calme_et_Volupt%C3%A9
The small dabs of colors used in this work indicated clearly that the painting technique was rooted in Pointillism. Pointillism (and later on Divisionism) features carefully placing individual color dots strategically on the canvas to appear blended from a distance. Matisse modified this technique by (1) replacing dots of colors with short dashes of colors; (2) instead of merging the adjacent colors dabs, as the Pointillist masters would do, to create a harmonious tonality, Matisse chose to keep the blocks of yellows, greens, blues, and reds in discrete areas of the canvas. These modifications increased the vibration of the color spots, resulting in a quivering sense of visual dizziness and enabled him to simplify the form, omit details, and create artificial structures that deviated from the reality of images.
Many of these same qualities can be found in artworks by other Fauvist artists as well. Collectively, they condensed into a distinctive trademark of Fauvist paintings. For these reasons, “Luxe, Calme et Volupté” is widely viewed as one of Matisse’s most celebrated works, as it hails in the Fauvist style.
Compared to “Luxe, Calme, et Volupté” of Figure 1, “Le bonheur de Vivre" of Figure 2 demonstrates Matisse’s departure from the use of Pointillist techniques and his progression towards the iconic Fauvist style – deployment of blocks of non-natural colors.
Figure 2 Henri Matisse, “Le bonheur de vivre” 1905-1906, source: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Le_bonheur_de_vivre
Although the pastoral scene of merry-making was nothing new in Western paintings, Matisse's daring use of non-natural color blocks was revolutionary. On the surface, the nudes, dancing, embracing, and/or playing music, are mutually interconnected via the skillful delineation of figures. At a somewhat deeper level, one also appreciates that the figures are also linked to the landscape by a sinuous network of curving lines.
At an even deeper level, one recognizes the overall unifying effect of color composition. In “Le bonheur de Vivre", Matisse dismissed conventional scriptures on depth and perspective, light and shadow, and pioneered creating visual pleasure and harmony via pairings of complementary colors (e.g., red and green, purple and yellow).
This is not only revolutionary but also aesthetically elevating. It liberates the colors from their underlining physical objects. In other words, from this point onwards, not only one can start to appreciate the aesthetical value of objects, such as green pastures of spring, yellow leaves of autumn, and white clouds on blue sky, but also one can start to appreciate sensory and sentimental values of colors and color combinations. For instance, just like that one can experience a pleasant and bright (or a dull and depressing) emotion upon hearing a properly composed series of music notes (a melody), one can also experience a pleasant and bright (or a dull and depressing) emotion upon viewing a properly composed array of color blocks (an abstract painting).
Unfortunately, none of these was generally appreciated when the painting was first exhibited at the Salon des Indépendants in 1906. Instead, it was widely criticized for its ambiguous theme and lack of stylistic consistency. Some critics even worried that this was the end of French painting.
Even today, after more than a century since the birth of this masterpiece, an in-depth appreciation of the true value to liberate colors from shackles of the natural objects is still lacking, probably because the artist community is still waiting for inspiration and guidance, on what to do with such colors once they are “liberated”. It is probably too abstract and unintuitive, up until now.
Fortunately, now we have AI and AI painting. This spells a great opportunity for human artists to take advantage of computers, since computers (equipped with proper AI algorithms) are naturally better suited than human brains for performing large scale screening of multi-color combinations and mapping the outputs to human (or even extra-human) aesthetics and emotions, which will, in turn, enable the epical endeavor, started by H. Matisse in his landmark “Le bonheur de Vivre", to be carried further in the direction of composing 2D melodies of colors.
Figure 3 Figure 4
Figure 3 “ES&AG AI Artwork 0068: Glow of Sahara”, 2021, Eric S. Shi, source: https://www.esandag-ai-art-studio.com. Figure 4 “ES-AG AI Artwork 0073: Flying Over Over Khan Tengri, to Yssyk-Kul”, 2021, Eric S. Shi, source: https://www.esandag-ai-art-studio.com.
Figures 3 and 4 are two AI paintings recently created at the ES&AG AI Art Studio. It is probably quite noticeable that when compared to Figures 1 and 2, not only the colors of the AI paintings are more bright and vivid, but also the color compositions are smoother and richer in melody and rhythm.
A discussion was made in an art commentary, “AI 艺术与普通艺术的区别(2): AI 绘画的彩色语言与点彩主义绘画的色彩语言之比较”, published on 《北美晨报》on 23 July 2021, to introduce a novel AI painting method, color gradient field method, to enhance the expressiveness of color compositions. Another article, “庆祝ESMC的诞生 • 从绘画中读取乐章”, was published on 《北美晨报》on 18 October 2021, reporting preliminary progress made at the ES&AG AI Art Studio by Eric S. Shi and his AI virtual assistants ESAG and ESMC on extracting music melodies from AI paintings.
From a mathematical point of view, for a problem of a 3-color arrangement at a given point in space, there are at least 17+ thousand possible answers that need to be considered, given a minimal set of 12 pure hues, each with 4 shades, not factoring in different opacities and/or coverages of colors. For a problem of a 4-color arrangement, there are at least 194+ thousands of possibilities to consider. Any one of these is way too much for human brains to keep track of, let alone putting them all together or attempting optimizations.
It is interesting to note that Cubism was also developed naturally, at least in parts, from Fauvism, on which we plan to comment separately. Rumor has it that Pablo Picasso, in an attempt to outdo Matisse, immediately began work on his famous “Les Demoiselles D’Avignon" after seeing latter’s “Le bonheur de Vivre" in an exhibition.
(Written by Eric S. Shi, @ www.esandag-ai-art-studio.com)
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