Postmodern Italy – in search of genuine wine
- Feb 26, 2024
- 7 min read
The natural wine debate has flared up again or, perhaps, it never went away. I was pondering this at the Centre Pompidou in Paris a while ago, while looking at Henri Matisse’s Luxe, Calme et Volupté, the neo-Impressionist painting from 1904, of which I took this picture. The short brush strokes with which the vibrant colours are applied to the canvas echoes the pointillism of Seurat’s Un Dimanche Après-midi à l’île de la Grande Jatte,painted 20 years earlier, but Matisse’s work is more radical, breaking away even further from the realism of the classical art canon than Seurat had dared before him.
With a group of like-minded artists Matisse caused more furore at the annual Salon d’Automne in 1905. The Salon d’Automne, organised annually since 1903, was a reaction to the Paris Salon, considered too strict and conservative in its selection of artworks. At the 1905 edition of the Salon d’Automne, works of Matisse, André Derain, Albert Marquet, Maurice de Vlaminck, Kees van Dongen, Charles Camoin, and Jean Puy were juxtaposed with a renaissance-style sculpture in the middle of the room.
The contrast was as crude as it was effective. It led the then-influential art critic Louis Vauxcelles to condemn the artists as ‘fauves’, wild beasts, and accused them of just flinging paint at the canvas. He was unable to recognise their inherent greatness, which was a liberation from classicism. In fact every artist in the group that became known as the Fauves had had an academic art training, which their new work now challenged.
