Maurice De Vlaminck

1876 (Paris) -1958 (Rueil-la-Gadelière)

Portrait de Maurice Vlaminck artiste moderne

Biography

Maurice De Vlaminck was born on April 4, 1876 in Paris to a Flemish father and a mother from Lorraine. While attending the local school in Le Vésinet, he studied the violin (which he later taught for a living), then studied literature and painting. He received drawing lessons and worked with Henri Rigal, but his temperament was anarchic (he rebelled against all discipline and declared that he had never visited the Louvre). He was attracted to the Impressionists and met André Derain, with whom he began in Chatou in 190, the research that would give birth to Fauvism. In 1905, he exhibited for the first time at the Indépendants, then at the Salon d’Automne, in the famous “cage des fauves”. The following year, Vollard bought his entire production. From 1908 onwards, abandoning pure color, Vlaminck was especially preoccupied by the lesson of Cézanne. Until 1914, he sought solid and geometric volumes, but he did not adhere to Cubism, whose limited intellectualism he violently denounced. Since 1919, when he exhibited at Druet, his exhibitions followed one another, notably at Bernheim-Jeune in 1933; at the Palais des Beaux-Arts in Brussels (153 paintings) the same year; at the Wildenstein Gallery in New York in 1939 and, finally, at the Charpentier Gallery, which devoted an important retrospective to him in 1956. He was awarded the Carnegie Prize twice, between 1939 and 193, and in 1955 he was elected member of the Royal Academy of Belgium. Vlaminck illustrated twenty-two works and wrote about twenty books: poems, novels and memoirs, the latter particularly tasty. The very personal expressionism that he had inaugurated around 1915 will gradually become realism. A land artist, both sensual and visionary; a “fauve” of exceptional vitality and talent, and one of the greatest modern landscape painters in the line of Constable and Van Gogh, Vlaminck was a complete painter. He died on October 10, 1958, in his house in Rueil-la-Gadelière (Eure-et-Loire), where he had lived for thirty-three years. All the museums of modern art of the world preserve of his works.