
The Roots of Fauvism
Fauvism has its roots in the post-impressionist paintings of Paul Gauguin. It was his use of symbolic colour that pushed art towards the style of Fauvism. Gauguin proposed that colour had a symbolic vocabulary which could be used to visually translate a range of emotions. In 'Vision after the Sermon' where Gauguin depicts Jacob wrestling with an angel, he paints the background a flat red to emphasise the mood and subject of the sermon: Jacob's spiritual battle fought in a blood red field of combat. Gauguin believed that colour had a mystical quality that could express our feelings about a subject rather than simply describe a scene. By breaking the established descriptive role that colour had in painting, he inspired the younger artists of his day to experiment with new possibilities for colour in art.
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