Maurice de Vlaminck

Justin Winter, New York
Bequest of the above in 1990

Madrid, Museum Caixa Forum; Barcelona, Museum Caixa Forum, Maurice de Vlaminck, Un Instinto Fauve, Pinturas de 1900 a 1915, 2009
Tokyo, Seiji Togo Memorial Sompo Japan Museum of Art; Oita, Prefectural Art Hall; Kagoshima, City Museum of Art, Maurice de Vlaminck, 2008

Canvas is not lined. Under UV light: spots of inpainting are visible along the top edge of the canvas at regular intervals, possibly to address previous nailholes. This suggests that the canvas may have been restretched. Otherwise no inpainting is apparent.
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This work, dating from 1910, reveals the extent to which Vlaminck, now under the influence of Cézanne, reacted against his early work as a Fauvist. His muted palette provides a startling contrast to the bold, primary colors of his Fauvist work and reveals a more subtle and meditative approach to landscape painting. Typically "Cézannesque" motifs in this work include the use of slender trees to provide compositional balance and the creation of volume and depth through the geometric shapes of the roofs of the houses in the background. 

At first glance, the austere and tender beauty of Cézanne's evocations of his native landscape would seem to be diametrically opposed to Vlaminck's aggressive and confrontational early works. Yet within this later development in his art there is an undeniable continuity with his early experiments with color. At the center of Cézanne's landscapes lay a desire to render nature and volume through color: "To read nature is to see it...by means of colour patches, following upon each other to a law of harmony. Nature's broad colouration is thus analysed by modulations. To paint is to record one's sensations of colour" (Philip Conisbee, Cézanne in Provence (exhibition catalogue), National Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C., 2006, p. 23). Vlaminck's decision to study the work of the master of Aix-en-Province was motivated less by a reaction to the excesses of his youth than a desire to achieve a more measured and mature approach to his central preoccupation, the artistic possibilities of color.