Maurice de Vlaminck
 Maurice
Vlaminck is considered one of the principal figures in the
Fauve
movement, a group of modern artists who from 1904 to 1908 were
united in their use of intense color. Along with artists such as
André Derain and Henri
Matisse , Maurice Vlaminck shifted the style of
Post-
Impressionism into the wildly colorful art of Fauvism. Maurice
de Vlaminck was born in the heart of Paris, near Les Halles. His
parents were both musicians of talent, although neither of them was
well-known. Vlaminck began to draw while in elementary school and
neglected his studies for his sketches. However, as he grew up he
showed talent as a violinist and as a champion bicycle rider, so
that he did not decide to become a painter until 1900 when he met
Derain. Maurice Vlaminck and Andre
Derain were good friends and neighbors in France; they made a
spectacular pair. Both were huge and both wore conspicuous
clothes. One of Vlaminck's favorite items of costume was a painted
wooden necktie. They lived and worked in a seaside suburb called
Chatou and invited Matisse to visit them there. The sight of
Vincent van
Gogh's paintings further stimulated Vlaminck, and he began to
paint as a Fauve, without any academic studies.
Vlaminck was about twenty-five at
the time; he was already married and had two children. He took life
a great deal more lightly than the others; he had no money. He was
a red-headed colossus, well known as a boxer and a wrestler. He
supported himself and his family partly as a violinist, sometimes
posing as a gypsy, and by writing pulp novels that skirted the
boundaries of pornography. He was a blatant self-promoter who
painted in furious bursts, often spreading the oil paint on directly
from the tubes. By the age of thirty, he had attained heights he
never regained in a long lifetime of painting. |
||
 Two
of Vlaminck's groundbreaking paintings,
Sur le zinc (At the Bar)
(shown above)and L'homme a la pipe (Man Smoking a Pipe) were
painted in 1900. In about 1909, Vlaminck experimented with Cubist
constructions in his landscapes and still lifes and showed a preference
in his palette for the pure whites and keep blues that are often found
in his later works. In 1911, Vlaminck traveled to London and painted by
the Thames. In 1913, he painted again with Derain in Marseille and
Martigues. In World War I Maurice Vlaminck was stationed in Paris, and
began writing poetry. Eventually he settled in the northwestern suburbs
of Paris. He married his second wife, Berthe Combes, with whom he had
two daughters. For the next few years Vlaminck lived in or near Chatou
(the inspiration for his painting houses at Chatou), painting and
exhibiting alongside Derain, Matisse, and other Fauvist painters. At
this time his exuberant paint application and vibrant use of color
displayed the influence of Vincent van Gogh.
Sur le zinc called
to mind the work of Toulouse-Lautrec
and his portrayals of prostitutes and solitary drinkers, but does not
attempt to probe the sitter's psychology—a break with the century-old
European tradition of individualized portraiture. In Maurice de
Vlaminck's landscape paintings he ignored the details, with the
landscape becoming a mere excuse to express mood through violent color
and brushwork. An example is Sous bois, painted in 1904. The
following year, he began to experiment with "deconstruction," turning
the physical world into dabs and streaks of color that convey a sense of
motion. His paintings Le Pont de Chatou (The Chatou Bridge),
Les Ramasseurs de pommes de terre (The Potato Pickers) (shown
below), La Seine a Chatou (The River Seine at Chatou) (shown
here) and Le Verger (The Orchard) exemplify this trend. |
||
 |
 After
1915, Vlaminck's palette became cooler and at the same time more
dramatic in intensity as he began to paint strong, vital, stormy
landscapes, overcast skies, lonely villages, and more earthy,
humanitarian still lifes in a more solid but still turbulent style. He
remained resolutely apart from all trends of contemporary art after his
brief adventure into Cubism and found in his return to nature a
realistic outlet for his early Fauve passion. After a brief skirmish
with Cubism, Vlaminck began striking out against the current trend.
From 1925 he traveled throughout France, but continued to paint
primarily along the Seine, near Paris. In 1935, Maurice de Vlaminck
retired to a large farm, La TourilliËre, near Beauce. Here he occupied
himself with agriculture, as had his Flemish ancestors, and continued to
paint deeply felt still life's and sensitive landscapes that show an
almost religious love of nature, the land, and its products. The
dozens of landscapes, golden wheat fields and chilly, wind-swept winter
scenes that Vlaminck painted here earned him the title "poet of stormy
skies". Maurice de Vlaminck is best known today for his Fauvism
period, a span that lasted about seven years. Vlaminck's later work,
which was the bulk of his career, continued to concentrate on color,
sell well and be seen in exhibitions that he did not attend. In addition
to painting, Vlaminck produced some fine lithographs, etchings and
woodcuts, and authored and illustrated a number of books. |
 |
Simply Art Homepage Art Styles and Fundamentals Index Artist Encyclopedia Rock Through the Pages