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Lot Essay
To be included in the forthcoming Maurice de Vlaminck catalogue raisonné being prepared by Maithé Vallès-Bled and Godeliève de Vlaminck under the sponsorship of the Wildenstein Institute.
A year after the notorious Salon des Indépendants exhibition of 1905, the dealer Ambroise Vollard purchased the entire contents of Vlaminck's studio, allowing Vlaminck to concentrate exclusively on painting for the first time. The output of his work between 1906 and 1907 thus increased considerably, but whereas relative financial security allowed Derain to rent a studio in Paris, Vlaminck stubbornly refused to leave his beloved Chatou in the Seine suburbs. He felt nothing but contempt for Parisian art circles and continued to paint the local landscape he had loved all his life. "I had no wish for a change of scene. All these places that I knew so well, the Seine with its string of barges, the tugs and their plumes of smoke, the taverns in the suburbs, the colour of the atmosphere, the sky with its great clouds and its patches of sun, these were what I wanted to paint" (J. Freeman, The Fauve Landscape, exh. cat., Los Angeles County Museuum of Art, 1990, p. 148).
As with many Fauve landscapes it is not entirely clear in which town the present oil was painted. Vlaminck would look down on a town like Chatou and generalise it in his painting, focusing on a row of houses or a church, and omit specific names from his titles. Les Arbres sur la Place possesses this anonymity, although it is possible that it depicts the town square of Chatou. Paysage près de Chatou in the Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam (fig. 1) is similar in both composition and in the artist's representation of the swirling landscape and houses. These paintings from 1906 are a vivid representation of Vlaminck's love of landscape; their vibrant, richly worked surfaces and sinuous lines embody the spirit of Fauvism. Discussing Vlaminck's painting from this period, John Elderfield notes:
His paintings of 1906 reveal the artist not only more instinctively attuned to the substance of the paint than any Fauve except Matisse, but also the one who managed to consolidate and find continued new expression in the broken Impressionist-derived touch that the others rejected ... He was the single member of the group who managed to sustain the sheer spontaneity of the original fauve vision, and who achieved the emphatic pictorial openness and expansive flatness characteristic of the second fauve style ... (J. Elderfield, The Wild Beasts, Fauvism and its Affinities, New York, 1976, p. 71).
The foreground in Les Arbres sur la Place is built up with sweeping strokes of yellow, cream and pink that stretch to a horizon cluttered with houses of dark blue and vermilion red. The spindly trees which break up the foreground explode into impetuous dashes of blue and white which radiate out to the upper edges of the canvas, interspersed with dashes of yellow and red. Vlaminck did not restrict himself to a particular technique, the earth and sky are handled quite differently: whilst the sky and foliage on the trees are agitated by dots, dashes and commas, while the ground is built up from stronger, more solid strokes. The cumulative effect of these expressive varied brushstrokes is extremely dynamic.
Vlaminck was, of course, first and foremost a colorist. His tones are as varied as the manner of their application. Vlaminck's handling of bold oppositions-- blue-black lines pitted against patches of white, the clashing of vivid blues and reds, and the powerful expanse of yellow--all attest to his continued interest in achieving a balance whilst constantly risking its dispersal through the dissonance of clashing hues. Discussing his handling of color, Vlaminck wrote, "I heightened all the tones ... I transposed into an orchestration of pure colors all the feelings of which I was conscious. I was a barbarian, full of violence. I translated by instinct without any method, not merely an artistic truth but above all a human one. I crushed and botched the ultramarines and vermilions though they were very expensive and I had to buy them on credit" (trans. by J. Rewald, Les Fauves, ex. cat., New York, 1953, p. 3).
In the same way that Vlaminck sought to create balance within his brilliant color scheme, he also strove to compose the pictorial elements within each work to provide formal structure. Here he has chosen a slightly raised perspective, giving the foreground equal prominence to the rest of the scene. A horizontal line divides the canvas: the row of buildings in the distance anchoring the oblique prospect. With the addition of vertical elements, trees in this case, a firm but unobtrusive structure is established within which Vlaminck can vary his brushstrokes and palette. Vlaminck often sought to structure his pictures thus and in Les Maisons à Chatou the scene is as carefully divided. Here, again we have an abrupt, close-up view with several horizontal bands of color leading up to the houses on the horizon. Strong vertical accents are added by tree trunks, and the row of houses.
Vlaminck's vision of the landscape was purely subjective, his delight in experimenting with all manner of forms, all manner of brushwork, and the most extravagant of colors appears inexhaustible:
Vlaminck was a painter of the modern world ... of suburbs seen through rosy eyes; he did not interpret the scene with the grey vision of a naturalist, intent on bringing out the ordinariness of the setting; he sought to communicate his delight in coming to grips with a familiar site. Guillaume Apollinaire ... once said that Vlaminck possessed a 'Flemish sense of pleasure and that for him painting was a carnival' (D. Sutton, Vlaminck: Dangerous Corner, London, 1961, p. 14.).
(fig. 1) Maurice de Vlaminck, Paysage près de Chatou, 1906. Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam. BARCODE 24769464
A year after the notorious Salon des Indépendants exhibition of 1905, the dealer Ambroise Vollard purchased the entire contents of Vlaminck's studio, allowing Vlaminck to concentrate exclusively on painting for the first time. The output of his work between 1906 and 1907 thus increased considerably, but whereas relative financial security allowed Derain to rent a studio in Paris, Vlaminck stubbornly refused to leave his beloved Chatou in the Seine suburbs. He felt nothing but contempt for Parisian art circles and continued to paint the local landscape he had loved all his life. "I had no wish for a change of scene. All these places that I knew so well, the Seine with its string of barges, the tugs and their plumes of smoke, the taverns in the suburbs, the colour of the atmosphere, the sky with its great clouds and its patches of sun, these were what I wanted to paint" (J. Freeman, The Fauve Landscape, exh. cat., Los Angeles County Museuum of Art, 1990, p. 148).
As with many Fauve landscapes it is not entirely clear in which town the present oil was painted. Vlaminck would look down on a town like Chatou and generalise it in his painting, focusing on a row of houses or a church, and omit specific names from his titles. Les Arbres sur la Place possesses this anonymity, although it is possible that it depicts the town square of Chatou. Paysage près de Chatou in the Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam (fig. 1) is similar in both composition and in the artist's representation of the swirling landscape and houses. These paintings from 1906 are a vivid representation of Vlaminck's love of landscape; their vibrant, richly worked surfaces and sinuous lines embody the spirit of Fauvism. Discussing Vlaminck's painting from this period, John Elderfield notes:
His paintings of 1906 reveal the artist not only more instinctively attuned to the substance of the paint than any Fauve except Matisse, but also the one who managed to consolidate and find continued new expression in the broken Impressionist-derived touch that the others rejected ... He was the single member of the group who managed to sustain the sheer spontaneity of the original fauve vision, and who achieved the emphatic pictorial openness and expansive flatness characteristic of the second fauve style ... (J. Elderfield, The Wild Beasts, Fauvism and its Affinities, New York, 1976, p. 71).
The foreground in Les Arbres sur la Place is built up with sweeping strokes of yellow, cream and pink that stretch to a horizon cluttered with houses of dark blue and vermilion red. The spindly trees which break up the foreground explode into impetuous dashes of blue and white which radiate out to the upper edges of the canvas, interspersed with dashes of yellow and red. Vlaminck did not restrict himself to a particular technique, the earth and sky are handled quite differently: whilst the sky and foliage on the trees are agitated by dots, dashes and commas, while the ground is built up from stronger, more solid strokes. The cumulative effect of these expressive varied brushstrokes is extremely dynamic.
Vlaminck was, of course, first and foremost a colorist. His tones are as varied as the manner of their application. Vlaminck's handling of bold oppositions-- blue-black lines pitted against patches of white, the clashing of vivid blues and reds, and the powerful expanse of yellow--all attest to his continued interest in achieving a balance whilst constantly risking its dispersal through the dissonance of clashing hues. Discussing his handling of color, Vlaminck wrote, "I heightened all the tones ... I transposed into an orchestration of pure colors all the feelings of which I was conscious. I was a barbarian, full of violence. I translated by instinct without any method, not merely an artistic truth but above all a human one. I crushed and botched the ultramarines and vermilions though they were very expensive and I had to buy them on credit" (trans. by J. Rewald, Les Fauves, ex. cat., New York, 1953, p. 3).
In the same way that Vlaminck sought to create balance within his brilliant color scheme, he also strove to compose the pictorial elements within each work to provide formal structure. Here he has chosen a slightly raised perspective, giving the foreground equal prominence to the rest of the scene. A horizontal line divides the canvas: the row of buildings in the distance anchoring the oblique prospect. With the addition of vertical elements, trees in this case, a firm but unobtrusive structure is established within which Vlaminck can vary his brushstrokes and palette. Vlaminck often sought to structure his pictures thus and in Les Maisons à Chatou the scene is as carefully divided. Here, again we have an abrupt, close-up view with several horizontal bands of color leading up to the houses on the horizon. Strong vertical accents are added by tree trunks, and the row of houses.
Vlaminck's vision of the landscape was purely subjective, his delight in experimenting with all manner of forms, all manner of brushwork, and the most extravagant of colors appears inexhaustible:
Vlaminck was a painter of the modern world ... of suburbs seen through rosy eyes; he did not interpret the scene with the grey vision of a naturalist, intent on bringing out the ordinariness of the setting; he sought to communicate his delight in coming to grips with a familiar site. Guillaume Apollinaire ... once said that Vlaminck possessed a 'Flemish sense of pleasure and that for him painting was a carnival' (D. Sutton, Vlaminck: Dangerous Corner, London, 1961, p. 14.).
(fig. 1) Maurice de Vlaminck, Paysage près de Chatou, 1906. Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam. BARCODE 24769464