January 2009

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In the early 1920s, the critic Louis Vauxcelles described the sale of the stock of the celebrated art dealer Daniel-Henry Kahnweiler. Vauxcelles was a highly conservative critic who had invented the term ‘fauves’ for Vlaminck, Derain, Matisse and Dufy at the time of the 1905 Autumn Salon, when he said that their paintings ‘shocked’ him. He was even more shocked a few years later by the Cubists – shocked enough to be able to appreciate the Fauves in comparison. Many of the paintings at the Kahnweiler sale were Cubist and having to look at their works explains why Vauxcelles felt that the sale began in ‘an atmosphere of torpor and boredom’. Then Kahnweiler’s Vlamincks were rolled out for sale. The room brightened. ‘Everyone woke up with a sudden start as if a stone had been thrown through the window.…This was painting.’ Visitors to this exhibition may well have similar reactions. This is painting! Well-organised by the Vlaminck authority Maïthé Vallès-Bled, it covers Vlaminck’s early and most crucial period, beginning in 1900 and ending in 1915. Vlaminck’s later work is ignored, but, nevertheless, this is the first monographic survey in Paris devoted to him since the Charpentier Gallery’s in 1956, two years before the painter’s death in 1958. As well as the 76 paintings exhibited, it also gives us a chance to look at the delicious ceramics he made between 1906 and 1910 and at some of the African and Oceanic sculptures of which he was a pioneering collector. Aside from the landscapes and seascapes for which he is best known, the exhibition also casts light on two more neglected sides of his work, his portraits and still-lifes.

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