"Oops! I did it again."

Britney Spears (pop star)

French art critic Louis Vauxcelles had a way with words. In 1905, he coined a term to describe the works of Henri Matisse and his contemporaries. Though not necessarily intended as a compliment, the name stuck. Matisse & co. became known as the Fauves ("wild beasts" in French).

Three years later, Vauxcelles had another opportunity to wow the world with his lexical abilities. Did he rise to the occasion?

Alvin Langdon Coburn, "Henri Matisse, Paris" May 13th, 1913, photograph, from The New York Public Library.
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Let’s set the scene: Vauxcelles walks into a gallery where the works of a young artist, Georges Braque, are on display. A former follower of the Fauves, Braque has taken his style in a new direction. The work he's presenting now looks nothing like the emotional, vividly colored canvases the Fauves are famous for.

So what do his pieces look like? For starters, they’re awfully geometric. In Houses at l’Estaque, the buildings are reduced to simple forms—triangles and squares—and the hills are transformed into semi-circles. Having abandoned the Fauves’ wild palette, he uses more somber tones.

It’s a shocking departure from the status quo, and one that pushes Vauxcelles to put pen to paper…

Georges Braque, "Houses at l’Estaque", 1908, oil on canvas. © ADAGP / Paris 2017.
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He writes that Braque’s work is a "terrible simplification," and says that "he misunderstands form and reduces everything—sites and figures and houses, to geometric schemas, to cubes."

That word, "cubes," is critical. First, because it’s unfavorable (Vauxcelles is no fan). And second, because it becomes the basis for a new name. Soon enough, Braque and others like him became known as Cubists.

Looks like Vauxcelles was more than a one-hit wonder!

Georges Braque, "The Clarinet", 1912, oil with sand on fine linen canvas, 36 x 25.5 in, The Guggenheim Museum, New York. © ADAGP / Paris 2017.

Georges Braque, "Large Nude", 1908, oil on canvas, 4.6 × 3.3 ft, Musée National d'Art Moderne, Centre Pompidou, Paris. © ADAGP / Paris 2017.
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WRITTEN BY

Benjamin Billiet

APPROVED BY

Gérard Marié

Professor of Art History

QUIZ TIME

Can you name an artistic movement coined by Louis Vauxcelles?