A Politics of Technique: Fauvism and Anarchist Individualism
The importance of anarchism for the Fauvist movement at the start of the twentieth century needs recognition. This paper explores the significance of distinctions within anarchist theory between anarchist-communism (which informed the majority of the Neoimpressionists) and the anarchist-individualism that inspired those members of the Fauve movement self-identified as anarchist: Maurice de Vlaminck and Kees Van Dongen. The more tangential and temporary relations of other Fauvists—Henri Matisse and André Derain—to the anarchist movement are explored as well. The growth of antimilitarism throughout the long Dreyfus Affair (1894-1906) equally distinguishes the late nineteenth century from the early years of the twentieth, deeply engaging the later artists, especially Vlaminck and Derain. These painters embodied their political refusal of the status quo in a style that broke all the rules of academic painting. Their choice of pure unmixed color—applied straight from newly available manufactured tubes of paint—applied in thick additive touches, with only approximate nods to readable form, constituted abstract techniques signifying spontaneity and direct expression predicated on their uniqueness as radical individuals. With a parallel technique, Van Dongen expressed his celebration of sexual liberationism and outsiderhood as radical individuality for both artist and sitters. Whether such maneuvers furthered political goals or only positioned the artists in a critical relation to bourgeois norms is one of the great questions of such manipulations of modernist language. Recognizing the discursive distinctions between these two aspects of anarchism and the centrality of antimilitarism helps in understanding the continued importance of anarchist thought for the development of modernism in twentieth-century art.
