816 Ch. 20 • Responses to a Changing World
considered the unsatisfactory values and dangers of mass society. He
sought to stimulate and shock viewers by using, for example, classical
images in strange, unprecedented juxtapositions, presenting erotic fantasies
and other representations of utopian escape.
In Paris, a disparate but supremely talented group of younger modern
painters exhibited their work in 1905. A critic dismissed the show as “touches
of crude colorings juxtaposed haphazardly; barbaric and naive games of a
child who is playing with the ‘box of colors.’ ” Another dubbed them the “fau
vists,” or wild beasts. The name stuck. The fauvists remained committed to
experimentation with colors and lines on canvas in their quest for the libera
tion of both subject and painter. They also painted landscapes, including
coastal resorts, with bright colors and open spaces. One hostile critic in 1905
described a fauvist s brush as having been “dipped in dynamite,” affirming
the perceived association between artistic and social, and even anarchist,
rebellion in some minds.
Pablo Picasso (1881 — 1973) is widely considered to be the first painter of
the modern movement. Influenced by his Spanish homeland, Picasso s work
(especially the paintings of his “blue period”) revealed the gloomy obses
sion with death that had characterized earlier Spanish painters. Picasso
drew on his own intense subjectivity. His work was rarely shown in Paris,
where he spent most of his career, in part because he mistrusted art deal
ers. His great influence came later.
(Left) The young Pablo Picasso in his studio. (Right) Picasso’s Les Demoiselles