Still life is a prolific genre for bringing forth the main ideas behind fauvism. These artists fought the traditions of intellectual perception of art. They sought to make art pure, appealing to  basic emotions and instincts, ascending from nature itself. Off with the self-abuse and self-pity, away from contemplation and the gallery play!

Dig for emotions and go for catharsis! Colour is the fundamental artistic device that is intuitively understandable and provides powerful emotional feedback, and so colour became the main character and the main subject of fauvist paintings. They used raw, pure colours and phased out traditional principles of its treatment – the light and shade, the perspective etc. This resulted in the distortion of the form and the two-dimensional composition – and so, the colour elements started to be separated by thick distinctive contours which we see in “Sunflowers” by Van Gogh, one of the predecessors of the fauvist movement. The colours interact in the eye of the viewer and their contrast or harmony induces the emotions the artist is struggling to reveal – like the subject and symbol in traditional paintings used to impose ideas. Fauvist paintings do not reproduce but participate in the reality as self-sufficing objects. The composition based on colour looks and feels solid, the elements are perceived as a single object by the viewer and his mind does not need to wander from a symbol to a symbol, from an object to and object to grasp the message. That is why the lopsided chairs, the tables hitting the walls under ludicrous angles, with things placed on them demonstrating the miracles of equilibristics (that would make Albrecht Durer of Rembrandt turn in their graves) look consistent, harmonious and well-balanced for the viewer who grasped the aesthetic message of fauvism.