IT BEGAN with a wisecrack. Louis Vauxcelles, the art critic for Gil Blas, visited the Paris Salon d'Automne in 1905, noticed an Italianate bust surrounded by the paintings of Henri Matisse and his followers and remarked ''Tiens, Donatello au milieu des fauves!'' (''Donatello among the wild beasts''). The label eventually stuck; what is usually thought of as the first art movement of the twentieth century had been baptised. But whether ''Fauvism'' really was a coherent art movement, or a label retrospectively applied to a group of disparate talents, remains open to question.
''The Fauve Landscape'', installed in the extremely beautiful new Sackler Galleries at the Royal Academy, is a polemical show which seeks to demonstrate that Fauvism was indeed a coherent movement and that all the artists who participated in it were driven by the same ambition: to create a new form of landscape painting. Its arguments are refuted by the very works that have been assembled to support them, which makes this an unusual but, nevertheless, intriguing show.
Vlaminck once said of his Fauve works that ''I wanted to burn down the Ecole des Beaux- Arts with my cobalts and vermilions.'' This sounds impressively like a manifesto, but beyond their preference for forthright colour - besides Vlaminck's incandescent views of Chatou there are equally high-toned, audaciously non-naturalistic paintings in this show by Dufy, Braque, Matisse and Derain - the Fauves had less in common than is often thought.
Disunity manifests itself in the wide variety of styles employed. Dufy, in a work like Boats at Martigues, seems fascinated by the decorative possibilities of paint applied in Gauguinesque patches, arranging the boats that are his subject like so many flattened ellipses on a field of yellow. Vlaminck, by contrast, for all his unconventional use of colour, rarely departs from conventional...
