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Vlaminck
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Maurice de Vlaminck was born in Paris on 4 April, 1876, to a family of musicians. While his father was a tenor and violin teacher, his mother taught piano. At first, the artist followed his parents’ passion and trained to become a professional double-bass player and violin teacher. However, Vlaminck also took up several other professions, including racing, journalism and painting.
Vlaminck moved several times with his family,...
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Maurice de Vlaminck was born in Paris on 4 April, 1876, to a family of musicians. While his father was a tenor and violin teacher, his mother taught piano. At first, the artist followed his parents’ passion and trained to become a professional double-bass player and violin teacher. However, Vlaminck also took up several other professions, including racing, journalism and painting.
Vlaminck moved several times with his family, first to Le Vésinet, a town near Paris, and then, in 1892, to Chatou on the Seine near Versailles. It was in Chatou that Vlaminck first began to develop an interest in painting, even though he was working as a mechanic and training as a professional racing cyclist at the time.
After marrying his first wife in 1894, Vlaminck stopped racing and returned to music. He taught violin, played in popular orchestras and performed in many cafés in Paris. He also briefly worked as a journalist and, in 1900, was called up for mandatory military service. It was after his service that Vlaminck met the artist André Derain, who encouraged his artistic leanings, and eventually shared a studio with him in Chatou.
Over the following years, Vlaminck visited several galleries and exhibitions, including a show of Van Gogh’s work at the Bernheim-Jeune Gallery in Paris in 1901, which had a great impact on his work in terms of palette, brushwork and genre. A self-taught artist apart from some drawing lessons, Vlaminck’s early canvases clearly illuminate his experimentation with different styles as he tried to define an idiom of his own. Nonetheless, the intense, sometimes violent expression achieved through the use of powerful colours and large, almost chaotic brushstrokes, which was to become typical of his work, was already clear in his first paintings.
It was at the Van Gogh exhibition, that Vlaminck was introduced to Henri Matisse, who encouraged him to exhibit his work at the Paris salons. In 1904, the artist showed some of his paintings for the first time at the Berthe Weill Gallery in Paris, and in 1905, at the Salon d’Automne alongside artists like Matisse, Derain and Henri Manguin, where they were received the title ‘Fauves’ or wild beasts from the critic Louis Vauxcelle for their bold, impulsive and ‘unrefined’ style. The following year, he exhibited eight of his canvases at the Salon des Independants, the exhibition which consolidated the success of the Fauves, and it was after this show that the dealer Ambroise Vollard acquired his entire body of work, and went on to arrange Vlaminck’s first solo exhibition later that year.
In 1911, Vlaminck was sent to England by Vollard, where he painted several landscapes, and in 1913, he travelled to Martigues and Marseilles with Derain to paint the landscape and skies of Southern France. The following year, the artist was called to military service, and only returned to painting after he completed his duties in 1917.
Following the War, Vlaminck moved to a small studio in Valmondois, where he produced many canvases which represented his rural surroundings and were characterized by a bold colours and bright light, along with a few self-portraits. These paintings also displayed a consciousness about composition and structure, which Vlaminck adopted after a visit to a retrospective of Paul Cézanne’s work in 1907. These works were shown at a 1919 exhibition at Druet, which cemented the artist’s fame in France.
Apart from painting, the artist wrote several novels and books, and illustrated many publications with his drawings, woodcuts, etchings and lithographs. A large collection of the artist’s graphic works was assembled by his friend Dr. Sigmund Pollag, and then donated to the Kunstmuseum in Bern in 1970.
Vlaminck died on 11 October, 1958 at his farmhouse in Rueil-la-Gadeliere, where he had moved in the mid 1920s.
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Born
April 04, 1876
Paris, France
Died
October 11, 1958
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