WHEN, in the Autumn Salon of 1905, a group of young and mostly unknown painters banded together and showed their works in a large center gallery, the Parisian art pub-
lic was startled if not shocked by the violence of their colors, the exceptional freedom of their brush work, the willful distortions and simplifications of forms, in one word the extreme boldness of their approach. The critic Vauxcelles, pointing to a quattrocento-like sculpture in the middle of the same gallery exclaimed:
"Donatello au milieu des fauves!" (Donatello among the wild beasts), and the name fauves stuck. Among those who participated in that historic exhibition were many whose names have since become famous-though not always for the work they did in their fauve days - and others who are almost forgotten. Fauvism represents only a short phase in the evolution of almost all of them but the importance of the fauve movement, which heralded the art of the twentieth century, becomes ever more evident as it recedes in time.