.jpg?w=1)
Lot Essay
Painted in 1908, La Seine à Chatou depicts Vlaminck's favourite Fauve subject in a style which bridges his colourist experiments of 1905-7 with his Cézanne inspired work of 1908-12.
The transition period landscape retains the dynamic brushstrokes of the later Fauve period whilst also embracing a new structure in composition very reminiscent of Cézanne. 1908 is truly the year where Vlaminck changed direction away from Fauvism. This is evidenced by comparing the present work with the late Fauve Seine à Poisy also executed in 1908 which must surely have been painted earlier in the year (fig. 1). There is no question that Vlaminck was deeply influenced by the retrospective of Cézanne's Le Pont sur la Marne à Crétail (Rewald 729, previously Morosov Collection now Pushkin Museum Moscow: fig 2), which reveals how Vlaminck had adopted both Cézanne's brushwork and his sense of compositional structure.
Such was his admiration for Cézanne during this critical period in his career that Vlaminck dismissed Picasso's cubist experiments as disgraceful attempts to better the structural finesse already introduced to 'modern' painting 25 years previously by Cézanne. Indeed he went still further claiming that Cézanne was an even greater artist than Rembrandt:
'La Peinture ne fait pas de progrès, elle se transforme selon l'époque, avec les moyens d'expression de l'époque. M Rembrandt n'a pas plus de sensibilité ni plus de grandeur que Cézanne' (Quoted in Florent Fels, L'Art et la vie Vlaminck, Paris, 1928 p.123-4).
The present oil was previously in the collection of William Coolidge of Massachussetts and was on extended loan to the Fogg Art Museum until its sale at Christie's in New York in November 1993.
The transition period landscape retains the dynamic brushstrokes of the later Fauve period whilst also embracing a new structure in composition very reminiscent of Cézanne. 1908 is truly the year where Vlaminck changed direction away from Fauvism. This is evidenced by comparing the present work with the late Fauve Seine à Poisy also executed in 1908 which must surely have been painted earlier in the year (fig. 1). There is no question that Vlaminck was deeply influenced by the retrospective of Cézanne's Le Pont sur la Marne à Crétail (Rewald 729, previously Morosov Collection now Pushkin Museum Moscow: fig 2), which reveals how Vlaminck had adopted both Cézanne's brushwork and his sense of compositional structure.
Such was his admiration for Cézanne during this critical period in his career that Vlaminck dismissed Picasso's cubist experiments as disgraceful attempts to better the structural finesse already introduced to 'modern' painting 25 years previously by Cézanne. Indeed he went still further claiming that Cézanne was an even greater artist than Rembrandt:
'La Peinture ne fait pas de progrès, elle se transforme selon l'époque, avec les moyens d'expression de l'époque. M Rembrandt n'a pas plus de sensibilité ni plus de grandeur que Cézanne' (Quoted in Florent Fels, L'Art et la vie Vlaminck, Paris, 1928 p.123-4).
The present oil was previously in the collection of William Coolidge of Massachussetts and was on extended loan to the Fogg Art Museum until its sale at Christie's in New York in November 1993.