The Leap Between Storms
The Leap Between Storms is a Fauvist action piece, and the Fauvism is doing specific work. Action as a genre tends toward two solutions for color — the photographic still that drains color toward grayscale realism, or the comic-book panel that uses primary saturation to signal speed. Fauvism is a third path. The Fauves of the 1905 Salon d'Automne argued that color is not the servant of the scene but its emotional truth, and that a sky can be vermillion and a wall can be cobalt because that is what the wall feels like to the figure passing it. The painting takes that argument and asks what would happen if the figure were mid-leap and the city were unable to hold still under her.
The composition keeps the figure on the upper-third intersection and lets the rest of the canvas do the storytelling. The leap is forward and slightly down, the arms loose and trailing, the hair lifted by the wind that the jade flag across the upper edge of the painting confirms is real and is moving across the scene from her right. The flag is the only diagonal that contests her arc. The buildings beneath her are flat painted planes of color — cobalt apartment fronts, ochre and burnt-sienna brickwork, a scarlet drainpipe running down the left edge, a viridian water tank squat on the right roof — and the painting refuses to give them perspective in the academic sense. They sit where they sit, in the flat planes that Fauvism preferred to Renaissance recession, because the truth of the scene is not how the buildings recede but how they crowd her arc.
The shadow palette is the part of the painting that announces its tradition most directly. The shadows are violet and burnt sienna rather than the gray or neutral umber that a realist would have used. Derain would have approved. The shadows are not the absence of light. They are the color the scene takes on when it is not in direct light, which is a different color from the gray the camera would have recorded. The viewer who reads the painting accepts the violet-and-sienna shadows without protest because the rest of the painting is already operating in the same non-naturalistic register, and the eye, having agreed to the cobalt buildings, has nothing left to refuse.
Action as a genre has often been reserved for the male figure. The convention is reversed here. The leap is hers, and the painting commits to her body as the subject — the strong line of her outstretched arm, the trailing feet, the expression that is neither fear nor triumph but the concentrated attention of someone in the middle of a movement she has rehearsed many times and is now executing. The genre is action. The figure is human. The Fauvist palette is the painting's argument that human action is most truthfully recorded when the city around the human action gives up its claim to neutral color and begins to vibrate at the saturation the moment actually contains.
What the painting captures is the in-between. She is not on the launch roof and not on the landing roof. The flag is mid-stream and the sky is mid-color, midway between the tangerine of a sun that has not quite set and the violet of a storm that has not quite arrived. The whole canvas is a held breath. Fauvism gave painters permission to paint the breath rather than the situation on either side of it. This painting takes that permission and uses it.