André Derain (1880-1954)
VAT rate of 5% is payable on hammer price plus buy… Read more PROPERTY FROM A SWISS PRIVATE COLLECTION 'At first sight, this decoration strikes the eye with its luminosity, and its bursting bright warm colours. These flows of creamy enamels, of glazed laques, of precious lava seem to 'lick' the outlines and surface of the object. Once cooled down, they fix their splendid colour-stains where one can find again the vital nuances of the sea and sky and of gold and blood.' (André Derain, 1909 in L. Dutrait, 'Metthey et les Fauves, Un céramiste et des peintres', La Revue de la céramique et du verre, Vendin-le-Vieil, vol. 89, July - August 1996, p. 22).
André Derain (1880-1954)

Quatre femmes

Details
André Derain (1880-1954)
Quatre femmes
signed 'A Derain' (on the base)
tin-glazed earthenware plate
Diameter: 9 3/8 in. (23.8 cm.)
Executed circa 1905-1907
Provenance
Galerie Zak, Paris.
Acquired from the above by the present owner in the 1960s.
Special notice
VAT rate of 5% is payable on hammer price plus buyer's premium.

Lot Essay

André Derain's first encounter with the ceramicist André Metthey goes back to 1904. Around twenty tin-glazed ceramics were executed jointly by Metthey and Derain over the period from 1906 to 1908. Derain's short experience with ceramics coincides with the time when he was producing wooden or stone sculptures and woodcuts, further developing how Fauve artists used ceramics as an alternative means of expression.

The experiment with the new medium of ceramics did not impede Derain in freely decorating ceramics as he directly quotes pictorial vocabulary from his own paintings. The subject, line and colours all recall André Derain's Collioure and Estaque fauvist paintings. The artist sometimes intentionally leaves the bright opaque white of the tin-glazed ceramic support to highlight the colours in the composition, just as he did with his Collioure paintings when preserving the blank canvas in places. Furthermore, Derain affords great prominence to the human figure in his ceramics, and in particular bathers inspired from the Antique, which again mirror his painterly oeuvree of the same period. This subject appears to have been very appropriate for Derain to depict on his plates, tiles and vases: he concentrates on framing the arabesques of the nudes' bodies within the frames, curves and angles of the various ceramic objects, thus recreating lively mythological and bacchanalian scenes.


André Derain, Les Baigneuses, circa 1908. Paris, musée du Petit-Palais. ©Photo RMN-©Bulloz.
©ADAGP, Paris and DACS, London 2006

More from Impressionist and Modern Art Day Sale

View All
View All