Maurice de Vlaminck

A French self-taught artist, painter and graphic artist, writer, an active member of the group “Fauves” (“Wild” or Fauvist).

The artist was born into the family of poor Parisian musicians (a Flemish violinist-emigrant and a pianist from Lorraine). Having learned to play the violin, he began to make a living early, without an opportunity to get a special arts education.

Maurice de Vlaminck was quite accurately called the “incinerator” of Expressionism in the group of Fauves. The artist, who attended only private drawing lessons from adolescence, said with pride that he had never visited museums (“did not cross the Louvre threshold”). Maurice believed that the study and copying the paintings of masters, like a specialized school, deprive the creator of identity, making him not a painter, but a theoretician.

Numerous solo exhibitions of Maurice’s paintings that took place in Switzerland, England and other European countries, as well as in the USA, helped him confidently gain sympathy among art lovers and art historians all over the world. They made the painter not only popular, but also financially secured. The artist was given the honor to represent France at the Venice Biennale in 1954. As a writer, Vlaminck left a legacy of several novels and autobiographies.

Key Ideas:

– In the early works of Vlaminck, there is an obvious interest in various painting styles, but Impressionism and Neo-Impressionism briefly attracted an emotional novice creator. In his first works, Maurice contrasted his material and sensual sense of nature to the poetic perception of the Impressionists. The objects are depicted in clear, well-defined contours, filled with saturated, though not bright colors. Impressionist in them is only the sky, preserving its airiness due to jerky white and blue strokes.
– Impressed with a retrospective exhibition of Van Gogh, Vlaminck created paintings, using a riot of pure colors. The fascination with Fauvism led the artist to an even more exalted experiment, marked by a perfect lack of shadow, with perspective plans turning into decorative planes. At the same time, space is involved in a mere vortex of colors.

– Developing his own style, the artist used a simplified geometrized interpretation of objects, which he borrowed from Cezanne. He managed to transmit quite a thin gradation of light, preferring a bright and contrasting color palette. Later, showing interest in Cubism, de Vlaminck little accentuated the three-dimensional forms in a number of works, but began to emphasize the contrast of light and shadow, achieving the dynamic emotionality of the paintings.

– Completely leaving Fauvism and his short flirtation with Cubism, the artist changed the gamma of paintings: they were filled with the restrained tension of mostly dark, even gloomy colors. Actively used black and white, leaden shades and cinnabar in his later works. Fractional strokes characteristic for the artist are highlighted with rhythmic, but more often uneven repetitions. A man appears in landscapes – even if he was not portrayed, his presence was implied.