ANDRE DERAIN (1880-1954)
ANDRE DERAIN (1880-1954)
ANDRE DERAIN (1880-1954)
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ANDRE DERAIN (1880-1954)
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A PASSION FOR THE ARTS: PROPERTY FROM A PRIVATE CANADIAN COLLECTION
ANDRE DERAIN (1880-1954)

La rivière à Montreuil-sur-Mer

Details
ANDRE DERAIN (1880-1954)
La rivière à Montreuil-sur-Mer
signed 'a Derain' (lower right); signed again 'a Derain' (on the reverse)
oil on canvas
25 5⁄8 x 21 3⁄8 in. (65.1 x 54.2 cm.)
Painted in 1909
Provenance
Galerie Kahnweiler, Paris.
Beurdeley collection, Paris (by 1943, until at least 1955).
Acquired by the family of the present owners, circa 1978.
Literature
M. Kellerman, André Derain: Catalogue raisonné de l'oeuvre peint, Paris, 1992, vol. I, p. 98, no. 159 (illustrated).
Exhibited
Paris, Galerie de France, L'influence de Cezanne, January-February 1947, no. 10 (titled Carrières-sous-Poissy).
Paris, Musée national d'art moderne, Derain, December 1954-January 1955, p. 17, no. 20 (titled Carrières-sous-Poissy).
Munich, Haus der Kunst, Von Bonnard bis heute: Meisterwerke aus französischem privatbesitz, July-September 1961, p. 19, no. 30 (illustrated, pl. 26; titled Landschaft bei Carrières-sous-Poissy).
Paris, Galerie Schmit, Derain, May-June 1976, p. 38, no. 19 (illustrated in color, p. 39).
Edmonton Art Gallery, Selections from a Private Edmonton Collection, June 1981.
Regina, Norman Mackenzie Art Gallery and Berkeley, University Art Museum, University of California, André Derain in North American Collections, October 1982-March 1983, p. 60, no. 14 (illustrated in color, p. 61).

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Lot Essay

André Derain, often remembered for his wild, chromatic contributions to the Fauvist movement in the first decade of the twentieth century, also created more naturalistic visions of the French countryside. La rivière à Montreuil-sur-Mer, for example, captures the artist's impressions of a picturesque northern French town. This composition is a deceptively simple and richly pigmented one. Derain flattened the humble village landscape to a densely knitted quilt of emerald and turquoise. The green foliage is punctuated by a few red roofs and bare patches of earth, represented by strokes of ochre, terracotta and clay-colored paint. The artist observed the rural village from the opposite bank of the Canche River, quickly recording the reflection of buildings and foliage on the surface of the water in the immediate foreground. This destabilizing visual effect was borrowed from the Impressionist masters of landscape, including Claude Monet.
La rivière à Montreuil-sur-Mer also exemplifies Derain's admiration of the Post-Impressionist painter, Paul Cezanne. Derain sought to emulate his bold, blocky, proto-Cubist landscapes after the latter artist's death in 1906. The present work embodies Derain's close study of Cezanne's constructive brushstrokes and flattened compositions, but also the younger artist's stated desire to find “in nature something different—something which is fixed, eternal, and complex” (quoted in P. Dagen, ed., André Derain: Lettres à Vlaminck, Paris, 1994, p. 175).

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