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11

MAURICE DE VLAMINCK (1876-1958) La Seine à Chatou signed “Vlaminck” (lower right) oil on canvas...

Currency:USD Category:Everything Else / Other Start Price:NA Estimated At:1,500,000.00 - 2,000,000.00 USD
MAURICE DE VLAMINCK (1876-1958) La Seine à Chatou signed “Vlaminck” (lower right) oil on canvas...

MAURICE DE VLAMINCK

(1876-1958)

La Seine à Chatou
signed “Vlaminck” (lower right)

oil on canvas

54.6 x 65.7 cm (21 1⁄2 x 25 7⁄8 in.)

painted in 1906

Estimate: £1,000,000–1,400,000

$1,500,000–2,000,000




Provenance

Galerie Paul Pétridès, Paris

Anon. sale: Sotheby’s, London, June 28, 1988, lot 23

Anon. sale: Christie’s, New York, November 19, 1998, lot 328

Acquired at the above sale by the present owner




Literature

Jean Melas-Kyriazi, Van Dongen et le fauvisme, Lausanne, 1971, p. 145, no. 4 (illustrated in colour, p. 23)


The Wildenstein Institute will include this painting in their forthcoming Vlaminck catalogue raisonné.


<p>During the few brief years when Fauvism flourished, Maurice de Vlaminck passed much of his time in Chatou, a small village that straddles the banks of the Seine on the outskirts of Paris. Unlike his principal Fauve colleagues, Henri Matisse and André Derain, Vlaminck did not travel widely. Far from a handicap, the familiar landscape of Chatou inspired some of Vlaminck’s most advanced paintings during the spring and summer of 1906, including the present work. Such canvases were later displayed at the October 1906 Salon d’Automne, “which showed that Fauvism was increasingly being recognized as the force it already had become. Among the highlights of the exhibition were the powerful Fauve landscapes of Vlaminck and Derain: Vlaminck’s paintings of Chatou, and Derain’s paintings produced in London that spring and in L’Estaque that summer” (John Elderfield, The “Wild Beasts”: Fauvism and Its Affinities, exh. cat., The Museum of Modern Art, New York, 1976, p. 79).
Many of Vlaminck’s most impressive Chatou landscapes depict the banks of the Seine, and often include boats floating on the river. In addition to this painting, such canvases include Sous le Pont de Bezons (fig. 1), and Chalands sur la Seine près de le Pecq (fig. 2). In each case the artist painted a glimpse of the immediate foreground, the intervening flow of water, and the opposite bank on the horizon. This particular composition clearly appealed to Vlaminck, for it allowed the artist to organize his audacious Fauve palette in a unique manner. As John Elderfield has explained, “Primary colors, the ‘pure colors straight from the tube’ that Vlaminck prided himself on using, tend to establish themselves as flat surface planes far more than mixed hues and so especially do red and blue or red and the ‘psychological’ primary green. This often presents problems, for it can easily strand the primaries in their own separate parts of the picture, rendering it incoherent. When Matisse first sought to use such fierce contrasts, his Fauvist idea was to place blue, red, and green side by side and assemble them in an expressive, constructive way. He found it possible also to pull them apart, capitalizing upon their individuality so that they signaled their opposition across his paintings. Vlaminck’s method was usually different from this. Instead of, say, a red signaling across to a green, Vlaminck would place a red next to a green, or a red next to a blue, and these would join themselves visually to identical combinations across the painting.
In some of Vlaminck’s paintings, this scheme produces an unfortunate evenness of effect. Repeated high-key contrasts together may provide a superficial pictorial unity but they finally seem monotonous. In many of his 1906 paintings, however, Vlaminck displayed remarkable compositional sophistication” (Ibid., p. 73).
Elderfield’s astute observations certainly apply to La Seine à Chatou, which may be counted among Vlaminck’s most sophisticated compositions of 1906. Here the artist has exploited the wide river to divide his bold combinations of primary colours. In the right foreground, for example, the artist used brilliant shades of red and yellow to describe the deck of the anchored boat. These same colours are applied to the top of the canvas, where they define a boathouse and a ramp on the opposite bank. Despite the intensity of this chromatic rhyme, it fails to overwhelm the present work. Vlaminck avoids this threat by activating the rest of the canvas with lively brushwork. In the wake of the 1905 Salon des Indépendents, Vlaminck had adopted a mixed-technique form of Fauvism, which combined flat areas of uniform colour with contrasting passages of broken, Neo-Impressionist brushstrokes. Such passages occur on the foreground bank, where the artist used short strokes of green and gold to describe the trembling leaves of the trees. More impressive, perhaps, are the myriad marks that settle across the Seine. Vlaminck has masterfully relieved this broad expanse of blue with a few staccato strokes of red. Here, at the center of the painting, these deft touches suggest the watery reflection of the boathouse, while also transforming the canvas into a glowing, jewel-like mosaic.


<p>This painting has been requested for inclusion in an exhibition on the works of Fernand Léger entitled “L’esprit Moderne” which will take place in Salzburg at the Rupertinum Museum of Modern Art from July 27 to October 20, 2002.
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