Les Fauves

(Beginning of the 20th century)
Fauvism has its roots in the post-impressionist paintings of Paul Gauguin. It was his use of symbolic colour that pushed art towards the style of Fauvism. Gauguin proposed that colour had a symbolic vocabulary which could be used to visually translate a range of emotions. In 'Vision after the Sermon' where Gauguin depicts Jacob wrestling with an angel, he paints the background a flat red to emphasise the mood and subject of the sermon: Jacob's spiritual battle fought in a blood red field of combat. Gauguin believed that colour had a mystical quality that could express our feelings about a subject rather than simply describe a scene. By breaking the established descriptive role that colour had in painting, he inspired the younger artists of his day to experiment with new possibilities for colour in art.

Les Fauves believed that colour should be used to express the artist's feelings about a subject, rather than simply to describe what it looks like.

Fauvist paintings have two main characteristics: simplified drawing and exaggerated colour. Neo Impressionist painters applied pure colors to their canvases in small strokes. The fauves rejected the impressionist palette of soft, shimmering tones in favor of radical new style, full of violent color and bold distortions.
 

Henri Matisse 

The Young Sailor

Beginning in 1905, Matisse spent the summers—and sometimes even the winters—in Collioure and continued to do so intermittently until about 1914. It was in Collioure that the sitter for The Young Sailor, an eighteen-year-old local fisherman named Germain Augustin Barthélémy Montargès (1888–1938), caught his eye. In this second version of the painting (the first, dated 1906, is in a private collection), the contours have been sharpened, the forms are more defined, and the colors have been reduced to large, mostly flat areas of bright green, blue, and pink—a decorative style and palette adopted by Matisse from this point on. Matisse also drastically altered the sailor's mood and expression. His stylizing brush wiped off the earlier round-cheeked youthfulness of Germain's face, replacing it with a masklike expression of savvy cunning from which a touch of licentiousness seems not absent. Germain's rather theatrical looks and his colorful costume, set against the pink candy-colored ground, combine to make this work one of Matisse's most decorative portraits in the Fauve manner.

References:
http://www.metmuseum.org/toah/works-of-art/1999.363.41
http://www.artyfactory.com/art_appreciation/art_movements/fauvism.htm
http://www.huntfor.com/arthistory/C20th/fauvism.htm