November 2008

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Look back over two vibrant years of Apollo: browse every issue from January 2006 to the present day.

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Vlaminck liked to say that his art was spontaneous. He never studied in a school, he learned by looking at the work of recent artists and by painting his own sensations rather than by copying in museums. His father was a violinist, his mother a pianist, and the young Maurice learnt to play the violin well enough himself to support himself and his young family by playing in an orchestra and giving lessons before his painting began to pay. He would always have another profession in addition to painting, first music and professional cycling, later writing. Bicycling led to painting. Bicycling round the Seine Valley gave him not only a sense of freedom but also an exuberant love of nature. ‘The desire to paint came from these excursions’, he wrote. ‘I wanted to bring landscapes to life, according to their interior realities…and in relation to the emotions they excited in me.’ He later joked that he might have raced in the Tour de France had he not become a painter. Van Gogh was Vlaminck’s other great discovery. A chance meeting with André Derain on a train in 1900 led the two young painters to share a studio. The fiercely anti-militarist Vlaminck had just finished his national service – which he hated – Derain was soon to begin his. Derain took Vlaminck to see the Van Gogh exhibition at the Galérie Bernheim in March 1901. The works made Vlaminck shout for joy. Van Gogh’s influence is there throughout Vlaminck’s brilliant Fauve period in La Vallée de Port-Marly (1904, private collection); in the dazzling Le Pont de Chatou (1905, The Museum of Fine Arts, Houston) with its brilliant mixes of orange, blue and green that must have seemed so startling at the time; and in Les Ramasseurs de pommes de terre (1905, Kunstiftung Merzbacher; Fig. 4), where the reds and yellows against the more sombre but still rich green and background are so vibrant that one might reach for the dark glasses. Calmer but no less dazzling is La Châtaigneraie à Chatou (1905, Troyes, Musée d’art moderne), in which the ground – yellow, green and red – seems in rich, flooding movement.