Painter, printmaker and writer, Maurice de Vlaminck (1876-1958), was along
with Matisse and Derain, one of the founders of the Fauve movement. Born
into a family of musicians, he learned to play the violin at a young age, a skill
he would use frequently as a struggling artist to earn extra money. As early
as 1900, Vlaminck shared a studio with Derain and they exhibited in the Salon
des Indépendants and Salon d’Automne, along with Matisse, where they
shocked the art world with their intensely colorful palette and expressive,
turbulent brushstrokes. Vlaminck’s Fauve paintings were influenced by the
works of van Gogh, which he first saw in an exhibition in 1901, and around
the same time, became more concerned with solidity and structure after
seeing the works of Cézanne.
Ambroise Vollard bought all of the works in Vlaminck’s studio in 1906 and
held the first exhibition of his work in 1907. In 1911, Vollard sent Vlaminck to
London to paint, as he had done with Derain in 1906-07. Much of Vlaminck’s
work from this period and later can be characterized as landscapes with
energetic, expressive brushstrokes and dramatic, bright colors (see lots 130
and 131; though his palette became darker and more somber with age). He
was dismissive of Cubism and did not participate in the burgeoning, avant-
garde movement that unseated Fauvism as the most shocking vanguard in
art at the time.
There were four paintings by Vlaminck in the Armory Show; three lent by
Parisian dealer Henry Kahnweiler and one by Munich art dealer, Heinrich
Thannhouser. The works were exhibited in Gallery I (dubbed “The Cubist
Room”) and Gallery G. One of the paintings,
Village (or Rueil)
, 1912, was
purchased by Chicago collector, Arthur J. Eddy (it is now in the Art Institute
of Chicago), and clearly reveals Cézanne’s influence on Vlaminck.
Dr. Albert C. Barnes also purchased one of Vlaminck’s paintings for his
collection,
Les Figues
, for $162 (roughly $3,800 today). Incidentally, it was the
only work Barnes purchased from the Armory Show, claiming his collection
was already far superior to the exhibited works and, surprisingly, he also took
an inscrutable amount of time to pay for his acquisition.
