Société des Artistes Indépendants

June 11, 1884, Maître Coursault, notary at Montmorency, Val-d'Oise, officially confirmed the establishment of the Société Article 1 of the organization's statutes reads, Members of the Groupe challenged this foundation and succeeded to have an exhibition arranged "for the victims of the recent cholera epidemic", inaugurated December 1, 1884, by Lucien Boué, President of the Paris City Council.

Art critic Roger Marx highly praised that year's exhibition and importantly, he continued to link its success to the ideals of freedom on which the society had been founded.

"Overall, the exhibition of the Independents is more and better than the protesting Salon des Refusés; it gives the example of an open society where the rights of all are equal, where everyone is answerable only to himself and remains individually responsible.

The artist admits and shows himself as he is, openly without pretense; the viewer, meanwhile, receives no watchword from the jury, follows the inclination of his preferences and decides, in his own way, from beginning to end.

From 24 March to 30 April, the burgeoning of Fauvism was visible at the Indépendants, prior to the infamous Salon d'Automne exhibition of 1905 which historically marks the birth of the term Fauvism, after critic Louis Vauxcelles described their show of work with the phrase "Donatello chez les fauves" ("Donatello among the wild beasts"),[9] contrasting the paintings with a Renaissance-style sculpture that shared the room with them.

In the Divisionist technique and brightly colored, it was painted in 1904, after a summer spent working in St. Tropez on the French Riviera alongside the neo-Impressionist painters Paul Signac and Henri-Edmond Cross.

Matisse is in charge of the hanging committee, assisted by Metzinger, Bonnard, Camoin, Laprade Luce, Manguin, Marquet, Puy and Vallotton.

It wasn't until the autumn of 1907 at L’Estaque that Braque began his transition away from bright hues to more subdued colors, possibly as a result of the memorial exhibition of Cézanne's work at the Salon d'Automne of 1907.

[17] André Derain exhibited his Dancer at Le Rat Mort, painted during the winter of 1906, and his large Bathers (Museum of Modern Art, New York) of early 1907.

The simplification of representational form gave way to a new complexity; the subject matter of the paintings progressively became dominated by a network of interconnected geometric planes, the distinction between foreground and background no longer sharply delineated, and the depth of field limited.

Cézanne's explorations of geometric simplification and optical phenomena inspired not just Matisse, Derain, Braque and Metzinger, but the other artists who exhibited earlier with the Fauves.

Even in the absence of Matisse and Picasso, Vauxcelles, in Gil Blas (20 March 1908) refers to the most innovative artists of the exposition as 'barbarous schematizers'... who want to create an 'abstract art'.

"Picasso, keen as a whip, spirited as a devil, mad as a hatter, runs to his studio and contrives a huge nude woman composed entirely of triangles, and presents it in triumph.

Matisse praises the direct appeal to instinct of the African wood images, and even a sober Dérain, a co-experimenter, loses his head, moulds a neolithic man into a solid cube, creates a woman of spheres, stretches a cat out into a cylinder, and paints it red and yellow!"

But now, translated into the idiom of subjective beauty, into this strange Neo-Classic language, those same women, redrawn, appear in stiff, crude, nervous lines in patches of fierce color.

On 25 March 1909, Louis Vauxcelles qualifies the works of Braque (Bracke, sic) exhibited at the Salon des Indépendants as "bizarreries cubiques" (cubic oddities).

[23] Louis Vauxcelles, in his review of the 26th Salon des Indépendants (1910), made a passing and imprecise reference to Metzinger, Gleizes, Delaunay, Léger and Le Fauconnier, as "ignorant geometers, reducing the human body, the site, to pallid cubes.

[3] The painting was entitled Et le soleil s'endormit sur l'Adriatique presented by the fictitious artist Joachim-Raphaël Boronali, the 'excessivist' from Genoa was exhibited at the 1910 Salon des Indépendants.

[23] The term 'Cubism' is employed in June 1911 by Apollinaire, speaking in the context of 'Les Indépendants', Musée Moderne de Bruxelles in Brussels, which includes works by Gleizes, Delaunay, Léger, and Le Fauconnier.

František Kupka, the Czech painter interested in non-representational painting based on analogies with music and the progressive abstraction of a subject in motion, joins the discussions.

Articles and reviews were numerous and extensive in sheer words employed; including in Gil Blas, Comoedia, Excelsior, Action, L'Oeuvre, and Cri de Paris.

This massive exhibition occurred exactly one year after Metzinger, Gleizes, Le Fauconnier, Delaunay, Léger and Laurencin were shown together in Room 41 of the 1911 Salon des Indépendants, which provoked the scandal out of which Cubism emerged and spread throughout Paris.

Its wide-ranging repercussions were felt in Germany, Holland, Italy, Russia, Spain and elsewhere (influencing Futurism, Suprematism, Constructivism, De Stijl and so on).

[32] Gleizes, on the other hand, would write in 1913 of the Cubist movements continual evolution: The changes it had already undergone since the Indépendants of 1911 could leave people in no doubt as to its nature.

Its enemies could, eventually, have forgiven it if only it had passed away, like a fashion; but they became even more violent when they realised that it was destined to live a life that would be longer than that of those painters who had been the first to assume the responsibility for it.

From which it became clear that these paintings—and I specify the names of the painters who were, alone, the reluctant causes of all this frenzy: Jean Metzinger, Henri Le Fauconnier, Fernand Léger, Robert Delaunay and myself—appeared as a threat to an order that everyone thought had been established forever.

Les Joueurs de football (Football Players) 1912–13, National Gallery of Art, Washington D.C. — Robert Delaunay The Cardiff Team (L'équipe de Cardiff ) 1913, Van Abbemuseum, Eindhoven — Fernand Léger, Le modèle nu dans l'atelier (Nude Model In The Studio) 1912–13, Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York — Juan Gris, L'Homme dans le Café (Man in Café) 1912, Philadelphia Museum of Art.

Picasso was nowhere to be seen, but others were, such as Archipenko, Braque, Csaky, Gleizes, Gris, Hayden, Herbin, Léger, Lhote, Lipchitz, Metzinger, Severini and Survage.

The renown literary figure André Gide present in the audience, fooled as the others, described the happening: "Some young people, solemn, stilted, tied up in knots, got up on the platform and as a chorus declaimed insincere inanities".

After World War II, the Salon des Indépendants was renewed with the artist group Jeune création, with the assistance of Dunoyer de Segonzac, Bernard Buffet, Jean Carzou, Maurice Boitel, Yves Brayer, Aristide Caillaud, Daniel du Janerand, amongst others.