Maurice de VLAMINCK (1876 - 1958)

Les voiles blanches à Chatou
Oil on canvas
Signed lower left
Executed in 1906
91x 73 cm (35 3/4 x 28 3/4 in.)

Provenance:
Ambroise Vollard, Paris
Dr Albert Davis
Redfern Gallery, London
Collection M. Janssen
Lefèvre Gallery, London (Titled: "Etude de bateaux")
Arthur Tooth and Sons, London (1966)
Justin Dart, Los Angeles
Sale: Sotheby Parke Bernet, New York, 4 November 1982, lot 46
Private collection, New York, acquired at the above sale
Acquired from Cyrille de Gunzburg for The Art Gallery of New South Wales, Sydney, by the AGNSW Foundation and the Margaret Hannah Olley Art Trust, 2006

Literature: Maïthé Vallès-Bled: Vlaminck, Catalogue Critique des Peintures et Céramiques de la Période Fauve, Wildenstein Institute Publications, Paris, 2008, no. 177, illustrated in colour p. 390

Although born in Paris, Vlaminck was the least cosmopolitan of the Fauve painters. When he was three years old his parents took their family to live in the Paris suburb of Le Vesinet. The small town of Chatou was nearby, and on the Ile-de-Chatou, a small island in the river Seine facing the town, Vlaminck made his first paintings as a teenager, under the tutelage of Henri Regal, a local naïve artist. Chatou was then a playground for tourists from the capital; they enjoyed sailing and canoeing along the wooded banks of the Ile-de- Chatou, and the hotels and restaurants in town were usually filled during the summer months. The Restaurant Fournaise, a former meeting place for the Impressionists, was still in business at the turn of the century.

The most modern structure in the town was its picturesque railway bridge, built in the 1840s, and the only local industry was a hand laundry housed in barges along the river. The attractions of the area were well-documented in photographic postcards, the distribution and sale of which had become a flourishing business.

Painted in 1906, Les Voiles Blanches à Chatou is a gleaming example of Vlaminck's Fauvism at its very height. Over the previous years, Vlaminck had increasingly come to use colour in its purest possible forms to capture the explosive brightness and intensity he sought in his art, sometimes even squeezing the oil directly from the tube onto the canvas without the use of a brush. Here, the varied blues of the shimmering water have been rendered in thick, impastoed blocks, which give the water a sense of movement and undulation.

It has become one of the great legends of modern art how Derain and Vlaminck met, in 1900, after their train had derailed. Each had seen the other wandering the streets and banks of Chatou, a then charming location, with canvases and brushes, but had never exchanged a single word. After their train derailed, though, the pair walked back to Chatou together, talking all the way and forming a friendship that would have vast implications for modern art. They rented a studio together and painted together, each spurring the other to paint increasingly vibrant and ferocious canvases. Where Derain had received artistic teaching and was an affluent student, Vlaminck was a penniless father, a self-taught painter, as well as having lived a life of extreme activities, be they as violinist, soldier, author or professional cyclist. His great love, however, was painting, and he rightly claimed to have truly set Derain, and therefore Fauvism, on their respective courses.

Derain, as a wealthy art student, was well connected in the art world and had introduced Vlaminck to Matisse as early as 1901, at an exhibition of van Gogh's works at Bernheim-Jeune in Paris. Matisse, in fact, made little impact on Vlaminck then; however, van Gogh had an immediate effect "In him I found some of my own aspiration," Vlaminck recalled, "as well as a revolutionary fervour, an almost religious feeling for the interpretation of nature" (quoted in J. Freeman, The Fauve Landscape, exh. cat., The Los Angeles County Museum of Art, 1990, p. 21).

Vlaminck saw in van Gogh's frenzied, intense works, a precursor, and indeed a means of exploring his own pictorial intentions. By 1905, Vlaminck had developed his own skills as well as the lessons that he had learnt from van Gogh's painting, and refined them according to his own pictorial needs. In Les Voiles Blanches à Chatou, the strokes, which give such a sense of restless movement to the work, are themselves a distant legacy of van Gogh's painting, while the colours themselves seem to hint at his predecessor.

It was truly in 1905 that these effects came to full fruition in Vlaminck's work, spurred on perhaps by the support he received on meeting Matisse again. This time, Matisse saw Vlaminck's art and was so impressed by the raw colour, the furious execution, that he travelled out to Chatou the following day to drink in their intoxicating colours once more. This formed the basis of the Fauve group - Derain and Vlaminck were joined by Matisse, who gave them not only the kudos to pursue their art, but also many chances to exhibit, culminating in the Salon d'Automne in 1905, the year Les Voiles Blanches à Chatou was painted.

It was at this exhibition that the incandescent colours of these artists' works attracted the attention of the press and public, at this time that they were named Fauves, (wild beasts) by an irate critic Louis Vauxelles, in a now world famous phrase: “Ah! Donatello parmi les fauves” (Ah! Donatello amongst the wild beasts).

In Les Voiles Blanches à Chatou, this wildness is clearly visible in Vlaminck's bright and bold rendering of a tranquil scene, of sail boats on the water. Where most artists of the period would have painted this scene like a bucolic idyll, Vlaminck has affronted the sensibilities of his age by using pure paints, by avoiding shading, tonal gradations - in short, by avoiding compromise. This all fitted well not only with his belief in the extreme subjectivity of painting, but also with his rebellious nature and political anarchism. As Vlaminck himself said, 'What I could have done in real life only by throwing a bomb which would have led to the scaffold I tried to achieve in painting by using colour of maximum purity. In this way I satisfied my urge to destroy old conventions, to 'disobey' in order to re-create a tangible, living, and liberated world' (Vlaminck, quoted in S. Whitfield, Fauvism, London, 1996, p. 33).

Here, the river life at Chatou, immortalised by Renoir, has been given life. Even though the era of the balls and picnics had passed by the time Vlaminck was painting Chatou (the restaurant which had served as Derain and Vlaminck's shared studio had been shown in full swing in Renoir's paintings), the relatively sparse scene has been given a sense of life that none of his predecessors had captured. Regarding his anarchy, it seems unlikely that by 1905 he knew as little about other artists as he liked to claim. Les Voiles Blanches à Chatou appears, in its subject matter, to be a direct assault on his Impressionist predecessors and their river paintings, especially Monet and Caillebotte at Argenteuil. However, Vlaminck was only being slightly disingenuous when he summed up his intentions, claiming that, in these 'I wanted to use my cobalts and vermilions to set the Beaux-Arts on fire, and interpret my impressions without a thought of what other painters had done before. When I have colour in my hands, I don't give a damn for other people's paintings: it's me and Life, Life and me. In art each generation should begin again' (Vlaminck, quoted in J.P. Crespelle, The Fauves, London, 1962, p. 112).

Certificate by the Wildenstein Foundation (1993).

Return to About us