By Susannah Edelbaum, to Museum Spotlight Europe
On view at Potsdam’s Museum Barberini through January 12, 2025, Maurice de Vlaminck: Modern Art Rebel, offers a grand retrospective of the artist’s unusual journey through 50 years of artistic movements. For the first time since 1929, an overview of Vlaminck’s work is being shown in Germany.
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) who found his way into a professional art career through the 1905 Salon d’Automne in Paris. During this event, he showed a number of paintings so brightly colorful and given over to expression and emotion that he, along with similar exhibitors like André Derain and Henri Matisse, were deemed fauves, or wild beasts, by the art critic Louis Vauxcelles. The name not only stuck, the artists embraced the title, and Fauvism became one of the 20th century’s first avant-garde artistic movements.
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’s three or so temporary exhibitions each year branch out into other styles and eras (the special exhibition preceding Modern Art Rebel was devoted to Amedeo Modigliani). Nine of his paintings are already part of the Hasso Plattner Collection, launching the show’s curation, with works on loan from institutions including the Tate Modern, Musée d’Orsay, Centre Pompidou, and the Metropolitan Museum of Art.
Additionally, by mid-century, Vlaminck’s oeuvre had more in common with the Claude Monet paintings hanging on the other side of the Museum Barberini’s grand hallways 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), toward the end of his career, Vlaminck’s work had long moved on from Fauvism to embrace an idiosyncratic style of late Impressionism.
Maurice de Vlaminck
The Grainstacks, 1950
Oil on canvas, 55 x 65 cm
RMN-Grand Palais (Musée d’Orsay), on permanent loan to the Musée des Beaux-Arts de Chartres, bequest of Maurice de Vlaminck’s daughter, Solange Prével-Vlaminck
© VG Bild-Kunst, Bonn 2024
In between, he tested a plethora of other artistic waters. Vlaminck’s Fauvist period which brought him initial acclaim and for which he remains best known today, was short, lasting from 1905 through 1906. Encountering Pablo Picasso in Paris, he became interested in Cubism. His tones shifted from bright colors to grays and ochers and 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.
Maurice de Vlaminck
Banks of the Seine at Bougival, 1906
Oil on canvas, 54 x 73 cm
Hasso Plattner Collection
© VG Bild-Kunst, Bonn 2024
Modern Art Rebel shines a light on Vlaminck’s temporarily out of step flirtations with various artistic movements and the inspiration he found in both his predecessors and contemporaries, while maintaining his own signature motifs of wild or 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, and 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.
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.
In the post-war period, however, the artist’s Fauvist career continued, even as he took his painting in another direction entirely, dispensing with any representation of technology as well as the post-war Modernism predominant among his contemporaries. 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.
Maurice de Vlaminck
Suburban Landscape, 1905
Oil on canvas, 60.3 × 73 cm
Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, Gift and Bequest of David and Peggy Rockefeller
© VG Bild-Kunst, Bonn 2024
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.” Moving along from one artistic style to another, and nearly always forswearing whatever the going trend was at the time, self-confidence was one of Vlaminck’s constants. Given his place in 20th century history, both during his life and now, it served him well.
Written September 2024
Cover photo:
Maurice de Vlaminck
The Bridge at Chatou, 1905
Oil on canvas, 68 × 96 cm
Staatliche Museen zu Berlin, Nationalgalerie, acquired with funds from the Deutsche Klassenlotterie
© VG Bild-Kunst, Bonn 2024
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