Fauve paintings, with their bold distortion of forms and exuberant colour, created great controversy when they were first exhibited in the early years of the 20th century.

Catalog of an exhibition held at the Albertina, Vienna, September 20, 2013-January 12, 2014.

Even though public and critical reaction to the first exhibited fauvist works was one of hostility and astonishment, fauvist paintings are today among the most loved of all twentieth-century art. Here are the artists--their works, relationships, achievements, affinities, and critics. 170 illustrations.

The eleventh volume in the series "The Documents of Modern Art" edited by Robert Motherwell.

First published in 1996. The art of the extraordinary French artist, Henri Matisse (1869- 1954), has provided visual pleasures and intellectual challenges to its viewers for the last hundred years. This is collection of gathered, summarized, and evaluated major literature on the artist primarily from France, the United States, Germany, and the Scandinavian countries, where major Matisse collections bear witness to early and intense interest in the artist's work.

Born at the dawn of the 20th century, Fauvism burst onto the artistic scene at the 1905 Salon d'Automne with great controversy by throwing bright, vibrant colours in the face of artistic convention. Fuelled by change, artists like Matisse, Derain, and Vlaminck searched for a new chromatic language by using colour out of its habitual context. Freed from the strict technique advocated by the École des Beaux-Arts, they used blocky colours as their main resource, saturating their stunning paintings. The author invites us to experience this vivid artistic evolution that, although encompassing a short amount of time, left its mark on the path to modernity.

Without question, the tache (blot, patch, stain) is a central and recurring motif in nineteenth-century modernist painting. Manet's and the Impressionists? rejection of academic finish produced a surface where the strokes of paint were presented directly, as patches or blots, then indirectly as legible signs. C?nne, Seurat, and Signac painted exclusively with patches or dots. Through a series of close readings, this book looks at the tache as one of the most important features in nineteenth-century modernism. The tache is a potential meeting point between text and image and a pure trace of the artist?s body. Even though each manifestation of tacheism generates its own specific cultural effects, this book represents the first time a scholar has looked at tacheism as a hidden continuum within modern art. With a methodological framework drawn from the semiotics of text and image, the author introduces a much-needed fine-tuning to the classic terms index, symbol, and icon. The concept of the tache as a ?crossing? of sign-types enables finer distinctions and observations than have been available thus far within the Peircean tradition. The ?sign-crossing? theory opens onto the whole terrain of interaction between visual art, art criticism, literature, philosophy, and psychology.