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Autoportrait, 1911
Huile sur toile, 73 x 60 cm
Paris, Centre Georges Pompidou, Musée National d’Art
Moderne, Centre de Création Industrielle
Donation Louise et Michel Leiris, 1984
Inv. AM 1984-677
© Photo CNAC/MNAM Dist RMN /© Droits réservés /
photo de presse
© ADAGP, Paris, 2007 |
Fifty years after the death of the artist, Musée du Luxembourg in Paris dedicates an exhibition to French painter Maurice de Vlaminck (1876-1958). About a hundred paintings and ceramics from the painter are exposed, as well as African art objects that inspired the artist. The exhibition begins in 1900, while the artist was still young. One discovers his unknown talents as a portraitist, like in
The little girl with the doll or
On Zinc. The paintings that represent dancers and prostitutes from The dead rat cabaret show his will to represent his characters with their flaws, as he wrote himself in
Portraits before death. Because Vlaminck, self-taught painter, did not only have one string to his bow. As a writer, he wrote some licentious novels (
From a bed to another, 1902,
All of that for this, 1903) and some autobiographical novels in which he tells his own vision of painting (
Dangerous corner, 1931). Thus the exhibition is punctuated with quotes from his own writings. Young, Vlaminck did at first begin a career as a professional cyclist and started making a living through his talents as a violinist, which he got from his parents. It was only from 1906 that he started living of his paintings, thanks to the large paintings dealer Ambroise Vollard. It is according to his request that he painted, like other painters, André Metthey’s ceramics of which the exhibition presents a selection.
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La Fille du Rat Mort, 1905
Huile sur toile, 78 x 65 cm
Kunststiftung Merzbacher
© Droits réservés
© ADAGP, Paris, 2007 |
But Vlaminck was primarily one of the masters of Fauvism, with Matisse, Braque and his friend Derain. Even if, like the most representatives of this movement, Vlaminck has just passed through Fauvism, the paintings from this short period (1905-1907) are, without any doubt, the most successful of the painter and the most representative of his art. Vlamink shows there is not necessary to visit South of France to find colour and light. Indeed he painted the landscapes of the Seine valley, Bougival, Chatou, Rueil or le Pecq, with large touches and a fireworks of red, orange, yellow, green, pink and blue, sometimes grazing abstraction, sometimes drawing dark contours around his motifs. From
Barges at Chatou to
The collectors of potatoes going through the darkest, but nevertheless fauvist, painting called
The chestnut grove at Chatou, Vlaminck uses everything that make the charm and the audacity of Fauvism: exaggerated contrasts, exalted and violent colours, impastos, simplification of shapes. The paroxysm is reached with
The orchard (1905), a painting that lets explore bright and pure colours in a mad gaiety.
From 1907 and until 1915, Vlaminck’s paintings slip from Fauvism to a more geometric representation of shapes. If the influence of Van Gogh is reflected in his full of simplicity still lives, it is the one of Cezanne that is the most evident in the productions of this period. The geometric shapes villages and his
Bathers (1907), which make think about
The young ladies of Avignon from Picasso, show Cubism is trendy. Influenced by African art, in fact Vlaminck will be attracted by the Cubist movement, but his intention to not get away from reality will make him touch lightly the Cubist experience. His Still life with a knife and his mix of geometric shapes and representation of reality show it. Similarly, rebel and fresh stems get out irresistibly from his bouquets of cubist flowers.
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Le Pont de Chatou, 1906-07
Huile sur toile, 68 x 96 cm
Staatliche Museen zu Berlin, Nationalgalerie
© Jörg P. Anders
© ADAGP, Paris, 2007 |
Because there is Vlaminck’s touch: everywhere a movement but never a veritable renunciation of colour. Vlaminck’s paintings, coming from several countries and brought together in Paris, create a bright and successful exhibition.
Exhibition: “Vlaminck: a fauvist instinct”
from February 20 to July 20 2008
Musée du Luxembourg
19 rue Vaugirard, Paris 6e — France
www.museeduluxembourg.fr