Maurice de Vlaminck was a French artist who played a great role in the foundation and development of Fauvism art movement along with André Derain and Henri Matisse. Vlaminck’s urban and natural landscapes, interiors, still lifes and portraits, as well as watercolors and gouache paintings are expressive due to the use of large, bright colored brushstrokes.
The artist also worked in such fields as engraving, illustration and writing.
Background
Ethnicity:
Maurice de Vlaminck’s father came from Flanders, the Dutch-speaking northern part of Belgium, and his mother was of the French origin, from Lorraine, a north-eastern cultural and historical region of France.
Maurice de Vlaminck was born on April 4, 1876 in Paris, France. He was a son of musicians Edmond Julien, a teacher of violin, and Joséphine Caroline Grillet, who gave the piano lessons.
Maurice had a younger sister, named Solange de Vlaminck who became a movie star.
Vlaminck spent his childhood as well as his youth at two French communes Vésinet and Chatou (1893-1905) situated not far from Paris.
Education
Maurice de Vlaminck was taught violin by his father.
As to painting, Maurice was an autodidact. However, he received some painting lessons from academic artists between 1888 and 1891, as well as from the painter Henri Rigalon in 1893.
Career
The beginning of Maurice de Vlaminck’s career can be counted from his work as a mechanic, the post which he occupied in 1892 in Chatou. To earn his living and to support his family, he also took part at the cycling races which he won many times as a professional bicycle racer. He never expected himself to become a professional painter, however, it was at that time when the artist created his first paintings.
At the age of twenty, Vlaminck started his military service in a regimental band. While in the army, Maurice de Vlaminck used his painting talent to produce a decoration for the regimental celebration in 1899. He also contributed as an author to radical periodicals, among which were Fin de siècle and L'anarchie.
Vlaminck completed his military service in 1900 and began to give the violin lessons to support himself financially. The same year, the artist met André Derain who became his friend and encouraged Maurice to pursue the career of the painter. Together, they rented a studio in Chatou and worked there for a year. One of the early Vlaminck’s works of the period was the painting called At the Bar dated to 1901.
During this time, Derain introduced Vlaminck to Henri Matisse at the exhibition of Vincent van Gog’s art held at the Bernheim Jeune gallery in Paris. The style of van Gogh impressed Maurice Vlaminck a lot and he started to introduce intense colors in his paintings, like in Barges on the Seine (1906).
In 1902, Derain left the studio in Chatou to do his military service. Nevertheless, two friends maintained their collaboration through letters. So, André Derain illustrated several pornographic novels written by Vlaminck between 1902 and 1903.
In 1905, Maurice Vlaminck presented his artworks at the Salon des Indépendants where the artist sold just one of his creations. The same year, Vlaminck participated at the Salon d'Automne along with Matisse and Derain. An art critic Louis Vauxcelles dubbed the artists "fauves" (wild beasts), the title which soon gave birth to the new art style, Fauvism.
The exhibition played an important role in Vlaminck’s career of the painter. Soon after the show, the artist was introduced by Henri Matiss to the well-known art dealer of the time, Ambroise Vollard, who bought the collection of Vlaminck’s works and proposed him a five-year contract. The following year, Maurice de Vlaminck held his debut solo exhibition. Typical canvases of Vlaminck’s Fauve period were Gardens of Chatou (1904), Picnic in the Country (1905), and Circus (1906).
In 1908 Vlaminck's style changed, and under the influence of Paul Cézanne's work he aimed at well-constructed compositions colored in darker palette than earlier. This is exemplified in Barges (1908-1910) and The Flood, Ivry (1910). During this period, the artist took part at several international exhibitions.
At the outbreak of the First World War, Vlaminck joined the war effort near Paris. At this time, he wrote his first poems. After the conflict, the artist had his second solo exhibition in 1919 in Paris, and his popularity continued to grow. Other significant exhibitions of this inter-war period were his retrospective at the Palais des Beaux-Arts in Paris in 1933 and the Exhibition of the Independent Artist which took place four years later at the Petit Palais in Paris.
Due to successful sales of his artworks, Vlaminck moved to the countryside, Rueil-la-Gadelière, and restricted somehow his contacts with the public.
During the Second World War, the artist published two articles and a book called ‘Portraits avant décès’ (1943) where he strongly criticized abstract art, in particular Cubism and Picasso. These writings had a bad influence on his popularity and reputation. However, Vlaminck presented his artworks at the Fauvist Exhibition organized in 1947, and at the Venice Biennale in 1956.
Maurice de Vlaminck spent the last period of his life in Rueil-la-Gadelière where he produced monochromatic rural landscapes, illustrations to different books and wrote a lot of poems and memoirs.
Due to his love to experiments with different art forms and his innovative mind, Maurice de Vlaminck who stood at the origins of Fauvism is considered as one of the most powerful personalities of French modern art of the 20th century.
During his career, Vlaminck created not only a great number of brilliant paintings and illustrations, but produced many poems, novels screenplays, and articles which provided him with wide recognition while alive. His fauvist manner with its vivid colors contributed to the development of such expressionist painting styles as Die Brucke, Blaue Reiter, and Neo-Fauvism. Vlaminck’s art had as well a great influence on Wassily Kandinsky, Ernst Kirchner, and Emile Nolde.
Guillaume Apollinaire, a French writer, called Maurice de Vlaminck "one of the most talented painters of his generation."
After the artist’s death, a huge retrospective of his artworks was organized in 1962 at Galerie Charpentier.
Nowadays, some of Vlaminck’s paintings are preserved at the Minneapolis Institute of Art.
There is a bust of Maurice de Vlaminck in front of the town-hall of Rueil-la-Gadelière.
Quotations:
“My father was a violinist, my mother a pianist. I was born into a world of music.. .The practicing of my father's pupils accompanied every thought and action of my childish life.. ..Then when I was thirty, my career as musician was brought to an end by Vollard [art-dealer in Paris] who bought all the pictures I possessed, pictures which I had painted over several years with unbounded enthusiasm during such hours of freedom as I was able to spare between [music]-lessons to my pupils.”
“I always look at everything with the eyes of a child. I feel enthusiastic for things today fort he same reasons as I was enthusiastic about them as a child..”
“For me, the discovery of the outside-world, dates from my acquisition of a bicycle. I spent whole days on the high-roads. I rode through villages, towns and the country-side. I tasted dust; rain poured down on me; I struggled against the wind. With my cycle I was able to visit places never dreamed of.. ..thanks to my bicycle I saw fort he first time the whole of the valley of the Seine from Chatou to Havre, Mantes, Bonnières, Rouen, Duyclair and Tancarville.”
“The thought of becoming a painter never as much as occurred to me. I would have laughed out loud if someone had suggested that I choose painting as a career. To be a painter is not a business, no more than to be an artist, lover, racer, dreamer, or prizefighter. It is a gift of Nature, a gift..”
“When I get my hands on painting materials I don't give a damn about other people's painting... every generation must start again afresh.”
"I wanted to burn down the Ecole de Beaux Arts with my cobalts and vermilions and I wanted to express my feelings with my brushes without troubling what painting was like before me... Life and me, me and life."
“The war [World War 1] gave me a certainty of belief. I grew aware of the bankruptcy of theories, of the theories of intellectuals as well as artists. L'art pour l'art and other grave problems no longer gave me a headache; they seemed to me so much bosh hand interested me as little as platonic love.”
“In art, theories are as useful as a doctor's prescription; one must be sick to believe them.”
“Good painting is like good cooking; it can be tasted, but not explained.”
Membership
Royal Academy of Fine Arts
,
Belgium
1955
Personality
In his youth, Maurice de Vlaminck was a very talkative person and had a reputation of troublemaker and a lover of women.
He was independent and stubborn.
Physical Characteristics:
Maurice de Vlaminck was tall and had an athletic figure.
Quotes from others about the person
"Vlaminck is entirely possessed by Vlaminck. It is his strength; dare I say, his virtue." Emmanuel Bénézit, a French collector, art historian and editor of the Benezit Dictionary of Artists
"..co-existent with.. ..a personal poetry and romanticism that is often gloomy and even violent, Vlaminck's pictures have a formal logic, an underlying strength of organization that derives from more than one classical precedent." Patrick Heron, a British painter
"His simple and intensive technique allows the lines their full liberty, the volumes their full relief, and the colors their full clarity, their full beauty." Guillaume Apollinaire, a French poet
Interests
violin, cycling races, folk art, African sculpture
Artists
Vincent van Gogh, Paul Cézanne
Connections
Maurice de Vlaminck met her future wife, Suzanne Berly, at the age of eighteen. They married in 1896 and had three daughters. One of them, Madeleine Berly-Vlaminck, followed her father’s footsteps and became a painter.
After the end of the First World War, Maurice and Suzanne broke up. The second wife of the artist, Berthe Combe, a fashion designer, was one of his students. She gave birth to two daughters, Edwige and Godelieve.
