Art Of The Day Weekly

Vlaminck, the return of a pariah?

RUEIL-MALMAISON – He was one of the greatest Fauvists, together with Matisse and Dufy. But he is not liked. There was one main reason for this: the famous trip to Germany organized in the fall of 1941 by the Nazi leaders. Vlaminck, then 65 years old, was among the artists with Dunoyer de Segonzac, Derain and Despiau. Matisse judged them cruelly in a letter to his son: “It was pitiful…A real caravan”. Vlaminck was never really forgiven, and his enmity for the untouchable Picasso who he felt was responsible for dragging French painting down a dead-end street, pushed him down even deeper into oblivion. There have been very few retrospectives of his work, which we can count on the fingers of one hand: one in 1956 at the galerie Charpentier, in 1987 at the musée des Beaux-Arts de Chartres, in 2008 at the musée du Luxembourg. The site chosen for this one may seem strange but is historically justified. On the eve of World War I, young Vlaminck, a real lover of bicycles, lived for some ten years at Rueil-Malmaison with his first wife. The Wildenstein Institute published the catalogue raisonné, and private lenders also helped so that the exhibition can proudly boast of certain works that have never been shown before to the public.
• Vlaminck at Atelier Grognard, from 30 January to 25 May 2015.

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