At the 1905 Salon d'Automne in Paris a group of painters under the leadership of Henri Matisse shocked the art world with their paintings characterized by brilliant color, expressive brushwork, and flat composition, as in Matisse's The Green Stripe, Portrait of Mme. Matisse.
The other major Fauvists were André Derain, who had attended school with Matisse in 1898–99, and Maurice de Vlaminck, who was Derain’s friend.
They shared Matisse’s interest in the expressive function of colour in painting, and they first exhibited together in 1905. Derain’s Fauvist paintings translate every tone of a landscape into pure colour, which he applied with short, forceful brushstrokes. The agitated swirls of intense colour in Vlaminck’s works are indebted to the expressive power of van Gogh.
