"Gauguin and the Fauves: Matisse, Rouault, Vlaminck, Camoin, and Derain," features extensive collections of Rouault (including several never-before shown Rouault mixed-media pieces from the Miserère), Matisse (Rouault's fellow student at the workshop of Gustave Moreau) and Vlaminck, along with token representation of Camoin (a friend of Matisse's, whose portrait of Matisse was on display at the Centre Pompidou in 1998) and Derain (who shared a studio with Vlaminck during the early years of the movement). The Fauves were a short-lived group, active mostly in 1905-6; yet the major artists of the group worked, each in his own way, for nearly fifty years afterwards, producing strong bodies of work that make their art as vital now as it was when they first began working.

In the course of researching our just-concluded show, Käthe Kollwitz and German Expressionism, we learned that when the German Expressionists planned their first shows, they tended to want to include in their shows works by those whom they saw as sharing their interests; the names of Van Gogh, Camoin, Cezanne, Derain, Gauguin, Matisse, Rouault, and Vlaminck tend to be regularity represented. Like the German Expressionist, the Fauves (a term applied to the group by a hostile critics that means "wild beasts"), were interested in color and in breaking through the conventions of Impressionism and Pointillism; also like the German Expressionists, the Fauves were interested in expressing their feelings both about their subjects and their belief that art could serve a prophetic call for reform and renewal.

At the heart of that belief, Sir Anthony Blunt has argued, lies a desire to "retire from the world and to live, in isolation, the life of the imagination" (see Georges Rouault: Miserere [Boston, 1963], pp. 2-3). Blunt goes on to discuss the common links between Rouault and the other Fauves: "The tendency of the Fauves to move away from the subject matter and away from a naturalistic treatment of the outside world was caused, in part at least, by a desire to escape from the unpleasantness of the actual world around them. Their method of escape was very different from Rouault's. They took refuge in purely decorative art, in an ivory tower of lines and colors, whereas he withdrew to religios contemplation. . . . But in a sense his withdrawal is part off the general flight from the world of reality which expressed itself in abstract painting on the one hand, and in the imaginative tendency ending in Surrealism on the other" (p. 3). From this general withdrawal, Vlaminck's landscapes might seem like an exception, until we remember how infrequently people appear in his landscapes, and even then, how indistinctly they are pictured when they do.