The style of painting called Fauvism (French: Fauvisme), flourishes in France from 1898 to 1908; it uses pure, brilliant color, applied straight from the paint tubes in an aggressive, direct manner to create a sense of an explosion on the canvas.

Dubbed Fauves ("wild beasts") by the critic Louis Vauxcelles, these artists, including Henri Matisse, Andre Derain and Maurice de Vlaminck, paint directly from nature as the Impressionists had before them, but their works are invested with a strong expressive reaction to the subjects they painted.

A related movement, Intimism, is practiced by Pierre Bonnard and Edouard Vuillard until about 1908-09.

Fauvism, unnamed until 1905, is too undisciplined to last long, and its adherents begin to move, according to their temperaments, toward the nascent Expressionist and Cubist movements, or toward some kind of neo-traditionalism.This thread, which explores Western art from 1898 through 1909 and its relationships to the main arcs of Intimism and Fauvism, contains many links to images and text concerning the works of various artists.