later, in munich, the artist franz marc would write in a way that kirchner would have understood.our ideas and ideals must be clad in hair shirts "and fed on locusts and wild honey, "not on history, "if we're ever to escape the exhaustion of our european bad taste." for the brucke artists, it seemed possible to live and paint as if making a reality out of a primitive idyll, and, thus, confront modern germany, industrial and militaristic, with an alternative. in france, there was a loosely aligned group of artists who could also, at times, paint explicitly primitivizing pictures, and who were drawn as well to the preindustrial. i mean the fauve. they preceded the brucke artists and provided a vital example for them. andre derain was a leading fauve at this time, and this is his bathers of 1907. for them, as for the brucke artists, an exciting stimulus was provided by paul gauguin's exotic, highly colored transformations of native life in france's south sea colonies. best known among the fauve was henri matisse. this is matisse's luxe, calme, et volupte. he began in 1904 to use a re