Fauvism was an early 20th-century movement in modern art based on the use of intensely vivid, non-naturalistic colors. Centered on a group of French artists who worked together from about 1905 to 1907, fauvism was the first of the major avant-garde movements in European art in the period of unprecedented experimentation between the turn of the century and the First World War.

The Fauves painted directly from nature, as the Impressionists did before them, but Fauvist works were invested with a very strong expressive reaction to the subjects portrayed. Great examples of Fauvist artists are Henri Émile Benoît Matisse, France, (1869-1954), and André Derain, France, (1880-1954).