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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
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