Wild things

On a balmy evening in Saint-Tropez during the summer of 1904, the French artist Henri Matisse grew irritated with his dot-painting Pointillist friends and went off to work alone. The end result of his travails that night was called Luxe, calme et volupte, after the Baudelaire poem. Matisse had not yet freed himself from the syncopated brush strokes of the Pointillists, but the theme and colours - pink, blue and violet nude bathers on a red beach against a brilliantly multicoloured sea - made this canvas the first Fauve painting. Appropriately, it opens the exhibition entitled Fauvism or Trial by Fire; The Eruption of Modernity in Europe, currently at the Paris Museum of Modern Art.

Two hundred and twenty canvases and six years later in 1910, the exhibition closes with another painting by the chief Fauve, Matisse, The Dance, from St Petersburg's Hermitage museum. While Fauvism is usually deemed to have lasted only from 1905 until 1907, Matisse was faithful to its style long afterwards. His nearly three-by-four-metre Dance has been called "the apogee of Fauvism", with its flat, brick-red figures forming arabesque arches as they skip across an emerald green earth and a cobalt blue sky.

Suzanne Page, the director of the Museum of Modern Art, calls Fauvism "an eruption of colour everywhere in Europe". Without theories, without a formal grouping of artists, the self-liberation experienced by Matisse that night in Saint-Tropez constituted a revolution in painting - the very foundation of modern art. France has not held a major Fauvist exhibition for 33 years, and Le Monde calls the show organised by Page "a delight, a feast, an orgy - almost to the point of saturation". It is financed by the LVMH luxury conglomerate and ABN Amro bank.

In the summer of 1905, Matisse consummated his break with the neo-Impressionists by moving west to the little sea port of Collioure, near the Spanish border. He enticed his friend Andre Derain to join him, and their paintings, along with four of their colleagues', were shown at the autumn Salon in Paris. Derain's Boats in the Port of Collioure shows how the painters egged one another on to greater daring. Derain left some of his canvas blank so that the whiteness of the light would burst through it. He did his best paintings in the Fauve period, as if the power of the colours he used - yellow and green skies, red-hot sand - exhausted his talent. "We don't understand what we are doing, what we are," he wrote, calling the experience "trial by fire".

In the snide comment that ensured his place in history, the critic Louis Vauxcelles remarked on an Italianate sculpture among the paintings by Matisse and his friends at the Salon. "Donatello among the Fauves [wild beasts]!" he exclaimed. The colour revolutionaries did not like the name, but it stayed with them; it seemed to suit their youth and rebellious nature. In 1905, Matisse was the eldest at 36, followed by Maurice Vlaminck, then 29, and Derain, 25. Matisse and Derain had met on a painting course in 1899. The following year, Derain came across Vlaminck - a giant of a man who raced bicycles, rowed boats, lifted weights and wrestled - in the train from Chatou to Paris. Matisse and Derain spent hours in the Louvre, but the self-taught Vlaminck hated the very smell of museums. "Forgetting is for me the whole secret of painting," he said. Vlaminck had nonetheless attended a Van Gogh retrospective in 1901. "That day," he said, "I loved Van Gogh more than my own father." His paintings of Chatou, where he shared a studio with Derain, owe a great deal to Van Gogh. Vlaminck said that painting allowed him to do things "that would have led me to the scaffold if I'd done them in life . . . I satisfied my desire to destroy old conventions, to `disobey' so as to create a sensitive, living and liberated world."

Derain likened paint tubes to "cartridges of dynamite" that released light. The art dealer Ambroise Vollard sent him to London, where Derain promised to "make something other than a colour photograph of the Thames". Only three years had passed since Monet completed his Waterloo Bridge series, but the distance between their paintings could be a century. Derain's 1906 Effects of Sunlight on Water is not identifiably a painting of London. Cobalt blue clouds loom in an orange-red sky, reflected in a beam through the green foreground - probably a river.

Kees Van Dongen, a Dutch painter working in Paris, was the most sensual of the Fauves. More than half of the canvas in Van Dongen's Red Dancer, completed in 1908, is taken up by the cancan dancer's pulsating, lifted red petticoat. The painting was snapped up by the Russian collector Riabouchinsky, and made a sensation in Moscow in 1909. The Hermitage Museum in St Petersburg has lent it to Paris for the Fauve exhibition.

Perhaps the most startling lesson of the show is how truly European the art world was at the beginning of this century - European "from the Atlantic to the Urals", as General de Gaulle used to say. The exhibition includes the work of Scottish, Belgian, Swiss, German, Czech, Hungarian, Finnish and Russian artists. Before our eyes, the colour revolution mutates into Expressionism, Cubism and Abstraction. As Matisse said, Fauvism was not everything, but it was the beginning of everything.

Trial by Fire; The Eruption of Modernity in Europe, is at the Paris Museum of Modern Art until February 27th