positive, direct role in the formation of the style. This was Cézanne. His. im-
portance cannot be too much stressed, and in a study of the development of
Cubism one finds oneself returning to him again and again. It was Uzanne,
more than any other painter, who provided a link between twentieth-century painting and traditional Western art.

Many of the contemporary historians and critics of Cubism agreed in seeing a
direct connection between Cubism and Fauvism, the other important style born
in Paris during the first decade of the century. This existed only in the most
limited sense; a move towards greater abstraction, the tendency to take greater
liberties with visual appearances, was the only very concrete way in which
Fauvism foreshadowed Cubism. Even so, the abstract element in Cubism was
the result of an entirely different approach from that of the Fauves. For while
Fauve painting at its most typical sprang from a free, spontaneous and often
highly subjective response to the external world, and for this reason seemed
occasionally to be so far removed from conventional appearances, the Cubists,
on the other hand, were led to still greater abstraction by the fact that their
vision was conceptual and intellectual rather than physical and sensory. The
Fauves, and particularly Matisse, admired Cézanne, and Braque may well have
been led to an appreciation of him through their example; but the ends to
which he put his study of Cézanne were, once again, totally different. In the
same way Picasso's attitude to primitive art had little or nothing to do with that
of Matisse, Derain or Vlaminck.

Indeed, viewed in retrospect, Fauvism seems to have belonged as much to the
nineteenth century as to the twentieth. For in so far as Fauvism existed as a
style or movement -- that is to say when, between 1904 and 1906, the works of
Matisse, Derain and Vlaminck all resembled each other to a certain extent and
had clearly-defined characteristics in common -- it was a synthesis of elements
drawn from the art of the past fifty years: Impressionism, Divisionism, the
decorative rhythms of Gauguin and the expressionism of Van Gogh, all con-
tributed equally to its appearance. And since Fauvism evolved no really con-
sistent technique of its own and was not governed by any very clearly-defined
aesthetic, it was not a style that could have anything more than a very fleeting
existence. It could well be interpreted as a sort of final paroxysm of post-
Impressionist painting. All this does not apply, of course, to much of Matisse,
and certainly not to most of the Matisse of 1906 onwards. But the Joie de Vivre,
while it is generally considered to be one of the key-works of Fauvism, and
while it incontestably represents a summary of Matisse's work of the previous
years, shows him in fact taking the decisive step towards the formation of his

-16-