Anarchy of Color

For Vlaminck, whose tenuous connection to the Paris avant-garde had resulted from his friendship with Derain and a rather fleeting acquaintance with Matisse, the association of his paintings with a movement perceived from the outside as a collective was a stroke of good luck. While artists such as Matisse had been classically trained as pupils of Gustave Moreau at the École des Beaux-Arts, Vlaminck had come to painting as an autodidact. Until the formation of Fauvism as a loose association of artists, he had earned his living as a bicycle racer, boxer, and violinist. Even after he temporarily moved into a studio with Derain in Chatou in 1900, he initially remained ambivalent toward painting as a profession: “I painted to restore my peace of mind, to calm my desires and, above all, to purify myself a little,” he wrote in retrospect in Dangerous Corner. “I had no preconceived ideas. Make a career of painting! How I would have laughed if someone had talked to me about that! To be a painter is not a profession, no more than being an anarchist or a lover, a race-track rider, a dreamer or a boxer. It is just fortune’s chance, just luck.”6Vlaminck 1966, 66.

The impressive journalistic echo elicited by the Fauvist works at the Salon d’Automne established a place for the young painters in the hotly contested Parisian art world, where they soon enjoyed the support of influential promoters such as art dealer Ambroise Vollard.7On the establishment of the Fauves in the Parisian art market, see Peter Kropmanns, “The Fauves and the Parisian Art Market,” in Basel 2023, 17–26. The perception of the art of Vlaminck and his colleagues as a radical break with the legacy of the nineteenth century—and thus also as avant-garde innovation—was based on more than just their unprecedented predilection for garish colors. Even more important was their often-arbitrary choice of hues, which were no longer intended to illustrate and imitate the motifs, but to transform them into a vehicle of subjective emotion—an anticipation of key premises of Expressionist painting. The popular association of their vibrant compositions with wildness and excess was anchored in an academic tradition that was beholden to doctrines handed down since the Renaissance and favored compositions with clear contours and harmoniously balanced tones. While form in the sense of disegno (“drawing” in Italian, as well as “pictorial invention” or “design”) was primarily associated with the sublime world of the mind and the ideal, color (colore) was considered an expression of the corporeal and emotional.8The extensive and heated debate over the relative preeminence of color or form that began in the sixteenth century has gone down in art history as disegno e colore and was intensively renegotiated in the nineteenth century. See, for example, Jonas Gavel, Colour: A Study of Its Position in the Art Theory of the Quattrocento and Cinquecento, PhD diss., Stockholm 1979; Maurice Poirier, “The Disegno-Colore Controversy Reconsidered,” in Explorations in Renaissance Culture 13 (1987), 52–86; Thomas Puttfarken, “The Dispute about Disegno and Colorito in Venice: Paolo Pino, Lodovico Dolce and Titian,” in Kunst und Kunsttheorie, 1400–1900, ed. Peter Ganz et al., Wiesbaden 1991, 75–99; John Gage, Colour and Culture: Practice and Meaning from Antiquity to Abstraction, London 1993; and Steffi Roettgen, “Venedig oder Rom—Disegno e Colore: Ein Topos der Kunstkritik und seine Folgen,” in zeitenblicke 2, no. 3 (2003), https://www.zeitenblicke.de /2003/03/roettgen.htm (accessed on January 2, 2024).

Moreover, many of the Fauves articulated the aims of their painting in language that suggested a deliberate attack on art-historical tradition. Derain, for example, described Fauvist color as “cartridges of dynamite,” intended to sensually embody the visual experience of pure light.9André Derain, quoted in Duthuit 1929b, 268. In retrospect, Vlaminck, who had become a fervent anarchist during his years of military service from 1897 to 1900, attributed his own penchant for boisterous color to a purely subjective and thus also antiacademic and anti-intellectual understanding of art. In one of the few passages of Dangerous Corner in which he discussed Fauvist painting at length, he wrote with unmistakable pathos, “My enthusiasm allowed me to take all sorts of liberties. I did not want to follow a conventional way of painting: I wanted to revolutionise habits and contemporary life, to liberate nature, to free it from the authority of old theories and classicism, which I hated as much as I had hated the general or the colonel of my regiment. . . . I heightened all my tonal values and transposed into an orchestration of pure colour every single thing I felt. I was a tender barbarian, filled with violence. I translated what I saw instinctively, without any method and conveyed it truly, not so much artistically as humanely.”10Vlaminck 1966, 74. Vlaminck’s choice of terms such as enthusiasm and tender was intended to situate Fauvist color in the realm of the emotional and the instinctive—stylishly dramatized as the heroic rejection of academic rules.

Among the works exhibited at the Salon d’Automne that were most shocking in their brash approach to color was Matisse’s Woman with a Hat of 1905 (Fig 1), a portrait of the artist’s wife, Amélie, in flat pastel hues, which soon afterward was acquired by American collector Leo Stein. Presumably it was the media attention generated by Matisse’s picture that prompted Vlaminck to create his own version of the motif (Fig 2)—though he himself would certainly have denied any direct influence on the part of his Fauve colleagues, particularly Matisse. For his portrait of Amélie, Matisse chose a three-quarter profile view and introduced a dynamic element into the composition through the slight turn of her head. Vlaminck, on the other hand, presented his subject frontally, effectively dramatizing the flatness of the picture plane. Although the contours of the body stand out from the background in strokes of dark blue and black, the figure lacks volume; spatial depth is suggested only by the oval of the slightly forward-tilting hat. Vlaminck rendered the woman’s face in broad, coarse strokes of pink and cream, her cherryred lips setting a pronounced accent in the center of the picture. The background is enlivened by energetic brushstrokes in white, green, and blue, whose diagonals contrast with the undulating horizontal strokes of the woman’s clothing. Even compared to other works by the Fauves, the seemingly unfinished, sketch-like quality of the painting seems jarring—the open structure of the visible, tactile brushstrokes flagrantly resists the academic ideal of the smooth, finished surface, known as fini.

While the social position of the subject in Vlaminck’s Woman with a Hat remains unclear, he produced a number of other figural paintings around the same time that unmistakably show women from the Paris demimonde. Many of them depict actresses from the infamous cabaret Le Rat mort, who often also earned their living as prostitutes. The theme of big-city sex work had already been explored in the late nineteenth century by artists such as Edgar Degas and Édouard Manet and was particularly associated with the work of Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec, who also painted Le Rat mort in the 1890s. The many images devoted to the motif by Vlaminck and other Fauves such as Derain or Van Dongen thus followed a pictorial tradition already established in the fin de siècle.11On nudes in Fauve painting, see Herbert 1992, esp. ch. 2 (“Mirroring the Nude”), 56–81. For the sociopolitical context of Fauvist bordel scenes, see Gabrielle Houbre, “With and without the Fauves: Perspectives on Prostitution in the 1900s,” in Basel 2023, 37–44. For a more general study of prostitution in late-nineteenth- and early-twentieth-century French avant-garde painting, see Bordell und Boudoir: Schauplätze der Moderne; Cézanne, Degas, Toulouse-Lautrec, Picasso, exh. cat., Kunsthalle Tübingen, 2005; and Splendeurs et misères: Images de la prostitution, 1850–1910, exh. cat., Musée d’Orsay, Paris 2015.

Vlaminck’s Reclining Nude (Fig 3) of 1905 exemplifies the element of grotesque exaggeration characteristic of his female nudes. The flesh of the figure is rendered in vivid shades of pink, against which the bright red of her swollen nipples stands out disconcertingly. The white-powdered, heavily made-up face with its rigid expression seems strangely dolllike; the abstracted surroundings, marked by the complementary contrast of blue and orange tones, appear uninviting and garish. Notwithstanding her lascivious pose, the image of the naked woman refuses erotic appropriation by the male gaze. Vlaminck’s Fauvist attack on nude painting, a genre dating back to the Venuses of the Renaissance, came to expression in similarly parodic manner in the painting Reclining Nude (Fig 4)​, also from 1905. Not coincidentally, the work echoes Manet’s Olympia of 1863 (Fig 5)​, the nineteenth-century scandal painting par excellence that was closely associated with the avant-garde pursuit of stylistic and artistic innovation.12On the scandal provoked by Olympia at the Salon of 1865, see Beatrice Farwell, Manet and the Nude: A Study in Iconography in the Second Empire, PhD diss., New York 1981; Hans Körner, “Anstößige Nacktheit: ‘Das Frühstück im Freien’ und die ‘Olympia’ von E. Manet,” in Streit um Bilder: Von Byzanz bis Duchamp, ed. Karl Möseneder, Berlin 1997, 181–99; and Dino Heicker, Manet, ein Streit und die Geburt der modernen Malerei: Ein Lesebuch zum Pariser Salon von 1865, Berlin 2015. While Manet’s image of nineteen-year-old Victorine Meurent had invoked the pictorial tradition of Old Masters from Titian to Francisco de Goya and Jean-Auguste-Dominique Ingres, Vlaminck quoted the great father of French modernism, to whom the Salon d’Automne also devoted a retrospective that same year with thirty-one works under the motto “The revolutionary of today is the classic of tomorrow.” In the painting by Vlaminck, Olympia’s cool complexion and youthfully appealing body yield to a dirty chalk white, whose sickly pallor is intensified still more by the contrast with the surrounding shades of red and black. Even more than in the other Reclining Nude, the body seems lifeless and clumsy, while the face turned challengingly toward the viewer appears inaccessible, stony, and rigid.

The ungainly limbs and masklike faces of Vlaminck’s figural images were influenced by his interest in African statuettes, which he enthusiastically collected. Like works of “naïve” art or the nonperspectival painting of the Middle Ages—particularly the fifteenth-century works known as the primitifs français—the Fauves viewed non-Western artifacts as a source of inspiration for an emotionally charged renewal of modern painting.13On Fauvist “primitivism” inspired by African art, see Rolf Wedewer, Form und Bedeutung: Primitivismus, Moderne, Fremdheit, Cologne 2000; Primitivism and Twentieth- Century Art: A Documentary History, ed. Jack D. Flam, Berkeley 2003; Roger Benjamin, Orientalist Aesthetics: Art, Colonialism, and French North Africa, 1880–1930, Berkeley 2003; Joshua I. Cohen, “Rethinking Fauve ‘Primitivism,’” in Cohen, The “Black Art” Renaissance: African Sculpture and Modernism across Continents, Oakland 2020, 23–54; and Maureen Murphy, “The Closeness of the Distant: A Plea for a ‘More Balanced’ History of Art,” in Basel 2023, 51–60. In Vlaminck’s Fauvist work, this process of cultural appropriation shows itself most clearly in the radically abstracted painting Red Nude, which once again suggests a stylistic dialogue with Matisse. The schematic head of the seated figure was probably inspired by a mask of the Fang people from Gabon in Central Africa, which Vlaminck acquired the year he made the painting.14See Vlaminck 1966, 71. As with his portrait of André Derain from the following year, here too Vlaminck may have chosen the dark red not only for its visual impact, but also to symbolize his programmatic affirmation of wildness and exoticism.

Although many of the Fauves joined Vlaminck in exploring figural representation, from the time of its christening at the Salon d’Automne in 1905 the movement was associated above all with landscape painting. Many of the artists drew inspiration from visits to the South of France, embracing the glittering light of the French Riviera as a catalyst for their dazzlingly colored images.15On the importance of the South of France and the light of the French Riviera for Fauvist painting, see James D. Herbert, “Painters and Tourists: Matisse and Derain on the Mediterranean Shore,” in Los Angeles 1990, 153–76; and Dita Amory, “Reinventing Color in Collioure (1905),” in New York 2023, 19–28. An important early work by Matisse is the ambitious painting Luxury, Calm, and Voluptuousness of 1904 (Fig 6), which stylistically is still informed by Neo-Impressionism. It shows a group of nudes gathered on a beach under the setting sun, decoratively assembled around a white picnic blanket. Glowing, jewel-like colors play about the figures, imbuing the southern evening scene with an enraptured atmosphere. Matisse’s pictorial invention had been inspired by a visit to the French Riviera in the summer of 1904, where he interacted with fellow artists such as Paul Signac and Henri-Edmond Cross. Thus it is hardly surprising that both stylistically and compositionally, it resembles Cross’s The Evening Air from around 1893 (Fig 7)—an homage to the enchantment of the South that Matisse could have seen at Signac’s Villa La Hune in Saint-Tropez.16“'To Paint Happiness’? Henri-Edmond Cross’s Landscapes,” in Potsdam 2018, 22–31, here 24–27.

Matisse returned to the theme of human leisure in a paradisical landscape in 1905–06, at the zenith of Fauvist experimentation. His monumental painting The Joy of Life shows nude women and men dancing, making music, and lolling about, softly embedded in a sunlit landscape with pure, glowing colors. Themes such as the harmonious unity of humanity and nature and the invocation of a Golden Age reflected the interest in nature utopias that had already characterized many of the pictorial inventions of the Neo-Impressionists. Iconographic references such as the ring of dancing figures in the center background strengthened the affinity to classical genres such as the fête galante or déjeuner champêtre—and, in a more general sense, alluded to the tradition of the pastorale.17On the significance of the Mediterranean for the Neo- Impressionists and the avant-garde allusion to the tradition of the pastorale, see Claudine Grammont, “Lux(e),” in Le Grand Atelier du Midi: De Cézanne à Matisse, exh. cat., Musée Granet, Aix-en-Provence 2013, 134–64. The monumental composition, which was exhibited for the first time at the Fauve-dominated Salon d’Automne of 1906, was preceded by numerous preliminary studies in which Matisse meticulously developed the complex figural program.

In Vlaminck’s Fauvist works as well, nature often seems symbolically charged with positive values such as vitality, nourishment, and human security. Yet the elegant spatial balance of Matisse’s programmatic painting could not be further removed from the impetuously expressive approach that defines Vlaminck’s mid-sized images of nature. Rather than conceiving an ideal landscape rich in art-historical and literary allusions, he turned his attention to his native Seine valley near Paris, painting numerous views of the landscape around Bougival, Rueil, Chatou, and Argenteuil.18On Vlaminck’s painterly exploration of the Seine valley, see Jacqueline Hartwig’s contribution to this catalog, 114–17. In these depictions of real places, explored situationally and sur le motif, Vlaminck focused on the here and now of an unspectacular nature, from which he could elicit a veritably explosive spatial effect with his garishly exaggerated colors, pronounced tonal contrasts, and energetic, strongly textured surfaces.

A decisive departure from his older colleagues’ choice of motifs becomes manifest in Vlaminck’s rejection of middle-class subjects, themes that had defined the art of Impressionism. Monet and Renoir, for example, had repeatedly painted the Seine as a hotspot of bourgeois leisure activities, branding it as a motif for a particular class and, more broadly, for a particular clientele. A classic example is Renoir’s Luncheon of the Boating Party from 1880–81 (Phillips Collection, Washington, DC), an important, large-scale work showing high-spirited vacationing urbanites at the Restaurant Fournaise—not far from Vlaminck’s later atelier. While the fashionably elegant clothing of Renoir’s figures clearly identifies them as middle-class excursionists, the bourgeoisie finds no place whatsoever in the landscape paintings of Vlaminck. A telling exception is the painting The Rural Luncheon (Fig 8), whose satirical elements verge on caricature: while the title of the picture awakens expectations of an idyllic scene of pastoral leisure à la Manet’s The Luncheon on the Grass (Fig 9), the garish colors and distorted perspective produce a disconcerting, even dissonant atmosphere. The grim, apathetic-looking women in white dresses and straw hats are vaguely reminiscent of Edgar Degas’s absinthe drinker, while the refreshments of the resting group are reduced to two wine bottles positioned in the center.20For a comparison of the works of Renoir and Vlaminck, see Herbert 1992, 20–21.

While here the bourgeois figures seem like foreign objects in a tangled web of color, elsewhere Vlaminck shows nature as a vital, protective space in which human beings are peacefully and harmoniously embedded. Remarkably many of his paintings are devoted to fertility and agriculture—themes his great role model Van Gogh had also explored on multiple occasions. Van Gogh repeatedly painted luxuriant fields of wheat with bright golden heads of grain against the fresh blue of the summer sky, as well as reapers, sowers, and farmers toiling on the land in solitary tranquility (Fig 10).21On Van Gogh’s adaptation of traditional rural motifs such as wheat fields or sowers, see Monica Juneja, Peindre le paysan: L’Image rurale dans la peinture française de Millet à Van Gogh, Paris 1998; Van Gogh’s Sheaves of Wheat, exh. cat., Dallas Museum of Art, 2006; Jean-François Millet: Sowing the Seeds of Modern Art, exh. cat., Van Gogh Museum, Amsterdam 2019; and Ceux de la terre: La Figure du paysan, de Courbet à Van Gogh, exh. cat., Musée Gustave Courbet, Ornans 2022. Vlaminck embraced these subjects in compositions that echo Van Gogh stylistically as well, while the emphasis on rural labor also recalls the rustic landscapes of Realist painters including Jean-François Millet.

The intensive reception of Van Gogh’s painting that began in early-twentieth-century France also focused on his pronounced interest in motifs of simple rural life.22Herbert 1992, 27–28. Due to his numerous images of rustic subjects, Van Gogh was celebrated as a painter of the common folk and his art lauded as authentic and natural.23Ibid. For Vlaminck, who presented himself as an artistic and social rebel throughout his entire life, this interpretation of Van Gogh’s art may have offered an additional layer of identification, while his own interest in rural subjects far removed from Parisian high society may have provided a suitable outlet for his socially critical and decidedly anti-bourgeois mentality.

For Vlaminck, moreover, the work of Van Gogh was characterized by a “revolutionary sense” and “an almost religious feeling for the interpretation of nature.”24Vlaminck 1966, 12. This pantheistic conception of nature as a mysteriously animate force may also have informed Vlaminck’s painting: in numerous landscape images, he employed a variety of stylistic means to create pulsating, highly charged visual spaces that evoke an immediate sense of unrestrained vitality—though often in complex compositions that belie the notion of a purely “instinctive,” “barbaric,” and thus unconsidered art. In his View of Bougival (Fig 11), for example, he chose a dramatic perspective looking down into the plain at the village, which appears strangely compact beneath the dynamic brushstrokes of the turbulent, cloud-filled sky. As in so many of his works, Vlaminck varied the direction of strokes and lines in the lush vegetation in the foreground. Together with the extreme complementary contrasts—red against green, blue against orange—the meticulously differentiated brushwork evokes the impression of an explosive spatial configuration in which the viewer’s eye scarcely finds opportunity to rest.

The compositional scheme of Vlaminck’s Fishermen at Nanterre is similarly sophisticated: while the surface of the river, suggested in short strokes of glowing blue and white, recalls the mosaic texture of Neo-Impressionist painting, the turbulent sky in the upper half of the picture is more freely rendered. The smokestack of the factory in the center towers up dramatically like a blood-red spear, while its reflection on the surface of the river penetrates the cooler color scheme of the middle ground. In the foreground, the vegetation on the banks of the Seine serves as an echo and a visual parenthesis, shooting upward like bundles of licking, darting flames. The tonal intensity of the composition recalls Derain’s aforementioned description of Fauvist colors as “cartridges of dynamite” intended to explode, as it were, on the canvas, discharging pure light.25André Derain, quoted in Duthuit 1929b, 268.

“With my cobalts and vermilions, I wished to burn down the École des Beaux-Arts and to render my impressions without any thought for what has been achieved in the past. . . . life and I, I and life.”26Vlaminck 1966, 11. In this retrospective statement from 1928, Vlaminck expressed the goals of his Fauvist painting, emphasizing his revolutionary embrace of pure color. His adroit use of anarchistic metaphor accorded with his lifelong self-stylization as an artistic subversive and revolutionary, steeped in the powerful visual language of Fauvism. Yet beyond his reception of Van Gogh, the examination of his painting within the context of late-nineteenth- and earlytwentieth-century artistic currents reveals numerous points of reference that nourished his new and innovative form of expression. The struggle for technical skill, a patient persistence in the painter’s craft, were of special importance for his Fauvist still lifes—studies in volume, spatial design, and color patiently executed in the studio, works that already anticipated the greater formal discipline he would embrace starting in 1907–08 under the influence of Paul Cézanne.27On Vlaminck’s reception of Cézanne, see Anna Storm’s contribution to this catalog, 50–57. While Vlaminck himself always posed as a loner and an outsider, and although as a talented author he helped forge his own myth early on, as an artist he was inescapably a product of his time.