“Vlaminck, un instinct fauve”, Musée du Luxembourg, Paris, 20 February to 20 July 2008.

      

The missing works of French painter Maurice de Vlaminck are worth a fortune, which is one of the reasons why amateur art collectors scour the antique shops in the back streets of Paris. Vlaminck began to paint seriously in 1893, when he was seventeen, but none of the dozens of pictures he completed before the turn of the century have ever been discovered.

Vlaminck played a key role in the dramatic development of European 20th century art, when a group of avant-garde painters added a new dimension to the impressionist style, using vivid, artificial and exuberant colours. When they first exhibited together in Paris in 1905, they borrowed a gallery that displayed early Renaissance statues. Pointing to one, an art critic exclaimed derisively, “Ici Donatello au milieu des fauves.”  (“Here stands Donatello in the midst of the wild beasts!”)  He did the avant-garde artists an unintentional favour, for the name caught on and the Fauvists flourished.

This exhibition brings together works of the period 1900 to 1915, when Vlaminck began experimenting with thick daubs of intense colour, applied straight from the tube. However it was the new impressions of space he created in collaboration with André Derain on the Ile de Chatou, a long narrow island in the middle of the Seine, that rendered his style so distinctive.

Vlaminck, noted for his violent unpredictable temperament, said that without it he could never have been a painter.  “My feelings were my paintings,” he said “I was a wild barbarian, but deep down tender at heart.”

www.museeduluxembourg.fr

Not all the paintings above are featured in the exhibition.

From our February 2008 e-newsletter