Fauvism, the first avant-garde art movement of the twentieth century, was influenced by the Impressionists' love of nature and contemporary life, as well as the Neo-Impressionists' strong sense of color. The Fauves, including Georges Braque, André Derain, Henri Matisse, and Maurice de Vlaminck, wanted to free color from its traditionally descriptive role, creating an art that expressed an emotional, subjective experience through the pure optical sensation of brushwork and hue.

The Musée national d'art moderne has developed a substantial collection of Fauvist paintings and a strong selection from Matisse's oeuvre. The Guggenheim, in contrast, has collected very few Fauvist works because its original mission was focused on non-objective, or purely abstract, painting. It was not until 1982 that the Guggenheim acquired its only major Matisse, The Italian Woman (1916), which, like the MNAM's Portrait of Greta Prozor (late 1916), is painted in the austere style characteristic of Matisse's World War I portraiture.

Cézanne's great influence can be seen in much twentieth-century artwork, including that of Derain. More than a decade separates Cezanne's Man with Crossed Arms (ca. 1899) and Derain's Portrait of Iturrino (1914), yet the similarities between them are strong. After seeing Cézanne's 1906 retrospective at the Salon d'automne, Derain abandoned Fauvism and began to explore the classical techniques of painting.