Maurice de Vlaminck: Modern Art Rebel

After his participation in the Paris Salon d'Automne of 1905, Maurice de Vlaminck became a leading representative of the French avant-garde. More than any other member of the Fauvists, he identified with the attribute of wildness and propagated the image of a modern artist rebel who had resolutely turned his back on the rulebook of the academies. His central source of inspiration was the work of Vincent van Gogh, whose colour-intensive works he had become acquainted with at a large-scale solo exhibition in Paris in 1901. Van Gogh's self-taught training and his maturing myth as an unrecognised artistic genius strengthened the identification that would also shape Vlaminck's later work.

In Germany, Vlaminck was celebrated early on as a pioneer of modernism. At the groundbreaking exhibition of the Cologne Sonderbund in 1912, he was more prominently represented with six works than French colleagues such as Henri Matisse or André Derain. As early as 1929, the Alfred Flechtheim Gallery dedicated an extensive solo exhibition to him in Düsseldorf. In the course of the National Socialist iconoclasm, his works were banned as "degenerate" in 1937 and paintings were confiscated from the holdings of German museums.

The starting point for the exhibition in Potsdam is the Hasso Plattner Collection, which has nine works by Vlaminck, including four key works from his Fauvist heyday. The 50 international lenders include the Tate Modern in London, the Museo nacional Thyssen-Bornemisza in Madrid, the Centre Pompidou and the Musée d'Orsay in Paris, as well as the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York, the Dallas Museum of Art and the National Gallery of Art in Washington, D.C.

An exhibition of the Museum Barberini, Potsdam, and the Von der Heydt Museum, Wuppertal, where the exhibition will be on view from February 16, to May 18, 2025.

Coinciding with the Vlaminck-exhibition, the Museum Barberini will be showing a small selection of prints by Camille Pissarro. The presentation of twenty-six prints from the Kupferstichkabinett of the Staatliche Museen zu Berlin offers a foretaste of the major retrospective The Honest Eye: Camille Pissarro’s Impressionism to be shown at the Museum Barberini in the summer of 2025.