Maurice de Vlaminck (1876-1958) French, Oil on Canvas. "Le Village en Hiver," c. 1956. Signed lower right. 

Condition: Good. 

Overall: 36 1/2 X 30 1/2 in. 

Sight: 27 1/2 X 21 1/2 in. 

Depth: 2 3/4 in. 

#3796 . 

Maurice de Vlaminck was born April 4th, 1876 on Rue Pierre Lescot in Paris, France. Along with André Derain and Henri Matisse, he is considered one of the principal figures in the Fauve movement, a group of modern artists who, from 1904 to 1908, were united in their use of intense color. His father Edmond Julien was Flemish and taught violin, and taught him to play the instrument as well in the hopes he would follow in his footsteps, but he began painting in his late teens, studying with a painter named Henri Rigalon on the Île de Chatou in 1893. In 1894 he married Suzanne Berly, before serving in the French Army. By his early 20s his experiences in the military had instilled a firm distrust of authority in him, leading him to join in anarchist intellectual circles in Paris. He met an aspiring artist, André Derain, with whom he struck up a lifelong friendship, and the two rented a studio together for a year before Derain left to do his own military service. In 1902 and 1903 he wrote several mildly pornographic novels illustrated by Derain. Although he and Suzanne had three children together, it was this coupled with his growing radicalism that led them to separate. He painted during the day and earned his livelihood by giving violin lessons and performing with musical bands at night. Vlaminck was one of the young experimental artists who participated in the controversial 1905 Salon d’Automne Exhibition. After viewing the boldly colored Impressionist-adjacent canvases of Vlaminck, Matisse, and others, the art critic Louis Vauxcelles disparaged the painters as “fauves” (wild beasts), thus giving their movement the name by which it became known. In 1911 Vlaminck traveled to London and painted by the Thames, before traveling to Marseille and Martigues to paint again alongside Derain. In World War I he was stationed in Paris, and began writing poetry. Eventually he settled in Rueil-la-Gadelière, a small village south-west of Paris, and officially divorced Suzanne in order to marry his second wife, Berthe Combes, with whom he had two daughters. From 1925 on he traveled throughout France, but continued to paint primarily along the Seine, near Paris. Resentful that Fauvism had been overtaken by Cubism as an art movement, Vlaminck blamed Picasso “for dragging French painting into a wretched dead end and state of confusion.” During World War II Vlaminck visited Germany and on his return published a tirade against Picasso and Cubism in the periodical Comoedia in June 1942. Vlaminck wrote many autobiographies, but alienated himself from other artists later in life, dying in Rueil-la-Gadelière on October 11th, 1958. 

Good.