Fleeting Fauve

For the final 40, most famous years of his life, Maurice de Vlaminck was renowned as "the poet of stormy skies."

At his farmhouse in the north of France, the artist slathered paint on hundreds of moody, windswept landscapes and chunky, darkly lit still lifes. These form the basis of his popular reputation in museums around the world. Little in the dour, somber tones of these pictures indicates that Vlaminck first made his mark as a member of the Fauves, the "wild beasts" whose savagely colored canvases so shocked Paris at the Salon d'Automne in 1905.

At that time, the sun shone in Vlaminck's pictures with greater fire and brilliance than in those of any fellow Fauve, including Matisse, Braque or Derain. Two dozen of these early paintings recently gathered together for an exhibit by Manhattan Dealer Klaus Perls showed the public what had rarely been seen by any but a few diligent art historians: Vlaminck's early work, taut with a passionate precision, is the finest of his career (see color).

Rock-Hard Canvases. Vlaminck did his best oils in 1905 and 1906, when he lived in the small Seine-side Paris suburb of Chatou. The burly, Belgian-descended artist had been a professional cyclist and cabaret violinist who taught himself to paint. In later years, he recalled: "I was a barbarian, tender and full of violence. I translated by instinct, without any method." In fact, his method of squeezing colors directly from the paint tubes onto the canvas was largely inspired by viewing the Van Gogh exhibition of 1901. In addition, portraits such as L'Enfant Madeline betray a vestigial debt to Renoir's child portraits, while the pointillistic detail and balanced composition of Vue de Chatou suggest more than a few hours spent in the galleries studying the neo-impressionist work of Seurat and Signac.

Just as one Paris retrospective lit the fuse for the 1905 Fauvist explosion, so in 1907 another snuffed it out. In that year, painters trooped in to view the Cezanne memorial retrospective. Before long, palettes all over Montmartre darkened as artists imitated Cezanne's can vases, which emphasized structure at the expense of color. The result was cubism, which is based in part on Cezanne's injunction: "Nature must be treated through the cylinder, the sphere, the cone." Vlaminck tried his hand at cubism, but with no great success. After four years in the French army, he emerged to develop his later moody, tempestuous vision; to the end of his days, he reviled Picasso as "the gravedigger of French art."

Fauvism lasted but two years--no longer than many present-day artistic vogues. Yet for Vlaminck, by virtue of his youth, temperament and training--or rather, lack of it--it was the right movement at the right time. He transmuted its gaudy splendors into rockhard canvases that can be looked at again and again without their seeming to fade or weaken. By the age of 30, he had attained heights he never regained in a long lifetime of painting. He also recorded, for later generations, the candor and gaiety of a placid era and countryside that were soon to be buried under the grimy onrush of history.

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