Maurice de Vlaminck at Museum Barberini: Spotlight on Fauvism

Until January 12, 2025, view Museum Barberini’s exhibit, Maurice de Vlaminck: Modern Art Rebel. Explore a grand retrospective of the artist’s unusual journey through 50 years of artistic movements. For the first time since 1929, Vlaminck’s oeuvre is being shown in Germany. 

Maurice de Vlaminck’s Beginnings

Competitive cyclist, violinist, dabbling anarchist, autodidact, and Fauvist—these were just a few of the hats worn by the 20th-century French Expressionist pioneer Maurice de Vlaminck (1876-1958). He found his way into a professional art career through the 1905 Salon d’Automne in Paris.

During this event in Paris, Maurice de Vlaminck showed a number of bright, colorful, expressive and emotional paintings. Vlaminck, along with similar exhibitors like André Derain and Henri Matisse, were deemed fauves, or wild beasts, by the art critic Louis Vauxcelles. Not only did the name stick, the artists embraced the title. Thus, Fauvism was born and became the 20th century’s first avant-garde artistic movements. 

The Hasso Plattner Collection

Established by German businessman and philanthropist Hasso Plattner in 2017, the Barberini’s permanent collection comprises Plattner’s vast Impressionist and Post-Impressionist holdings. The museum hosts about three temporary exhibitions each year. Each branch out into different styles and eras. For example, before Modern Art Rebel, Museum Barberini featured Amedeo Modigliani. Nine of Vlaminck’s paintings are part of the Hasso Plattner Collection, launching the show’s curation. Other Vlaminck works are on loan from: Tate Modern, Musée d’Orsay, Centre Pompidou, and the Metropolitan Museum of Art.

Additionally, by mid-century, Vlaminck’s artworks had more in common with Claude Monet’s paintings than it did the work of his early fellow Fauvists like Henri Matisse and André Derain. Exemplified in Modern Art Rebel through paintings like The Grainstacks (1950) and Stormy Landscape (1950), Vlaminck’s work had long moved on from Fauvism to embrace an idiosyncratic style of late Impressionism. 

Maurice de Vlaminck: A Multi-Disciplinary Artist

In between, he tested a plethora of other artistic waters. Although short lived, Vlaminck’s Fauvist period (1905-1906) brought him initial acclaim and continues to remain as his defining period. Encountering Pablo Picasso in Paris, he became interested in Cubism. His tones shifted from bright colors to grays and ochers. In addition, his dynamic, Vincent Van Gogh-influenced brushstrokes, seen in paintings like The Wheat Field (1906) and Banks of the Seine at Bougival (1906), gave way to flatter, more geometrical planes.

But what Modern Art Rebel reveals is how Vlaminck never totally immersed himself in any of the movements he tried on. In a Cubist still life he painted in 1910-11, the objects still show the reflection of light—a realist detail that pulls the painting away from the avant-garde and toward the Old Masters. 

From Fauvism to Cubism and Beyond

Modern Art Rebel shines a light on Vlaminck’s temporally out of step flirtations with various artistic movements. He found inspiration in both his predecessors and contemporaries, while maintaining his own signature motifs of heavy brushstrokes, strong contours, and chromatic intensity. As such, the show is both a comprehensive look at Vlaminck’s entire oeuvre as well as a sort of crash course in European art history from 1890 to 1950. 

In addition to Cubism, the artist experimented with pointillism and Post-Impressionism. He was mentored by Henri Matisse, inspired by Van Gogh, and admired Paul Cézanne. His career had one turning point after another. Prior to World War I, Vlaminck adopted Cézanne’s geometric forms. He shifted from the Fauvist colors that brought him acclaim to muted tones reminiscent of Picasso’s Cubist works.

After the war, his focus moved to the outdoors, although he still painted inside a studio, using photographs and postcards. While clearly referencing late Impressionism, Vlaminck’s landscapes are nevertheless unique to him, set under dark skies and shot through with a sense of doom. 

Politics and Paint

During the German occupation of France in World War II, Vlaminck eschewed the French modernists altogether. The one-time anarchist also spoke positively of the Third Reich’s cultural politics after a 1941 trip to Germany, sponsored by the German ministry of propaganda.

The exhibition explains this unfortunate period of Vlaminck’s political leanings, although there is little to see for it. The French artist’s collaboration with the enemy was intellectual but not practical, and didn’t seem to influence his work (much of which was still deemed “degenerate” by the very regime he expressed enthusiasm for). After France’s 1944 liberation, Vlaminck was barred from exhibiting for a year due to his wartime stance. 

Maurice de Vlaminck Post-War

In the post-war period, however, the artist’s Fauvist career continued. While Vlaminck was painting landscapes, his earlier Fauvist works were shown alongside those of his friend and former studio-mate, André Derain, at Paris’s Galerie Bing in 1947. In 1955, he was classified as a Fauvist painter at documenta 1, Germany’s first post-war comprehensive international art exhibition.

At the turn of the century, and the start of his career, Vlaminck felt himself a willful outsider, one who “wished to burn down the École des Beaux-Arts.” By the end of World War I, the artist had lost faith in institutions across society, declaring: “I don’t believe in anything any longer. I only have confidence in myself.” Self-confidence was one of Vlaminck’s only constants. For example, he frequently moved from one artistic style to another and nearly always forswore whatever the going trend was at the time. Given his place in 20th century history, both during his life and now, this confidence served him well. 

Cover photo: Maurice de Vlaminck. The Bridge at Chatou, 1905. © VG Bild-Kunst, Bonn 2024

[Written September 2024]

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