Maurice de Vlaminck

Galerie Kleinmann et Cie, Paris
Galerie Aktuaryus, Strasbourg (before 1939) 
Prof. Dr. Walter Hadorn, Bern (probably by 1950)
Galerie Beyeler, Basel (acquired from the above)
Acquired from the above in 1977

Bern, Kunsthalle, Les Fauves, 1950, no. 110
Schaffhausen, Museum zu Allerheiligen; Berlin, Nationalgalerie der Ehemals Staatlichen Museen, Orangerie des Schlosses Charlottenburg, Triumph der Farbe, Eine Europäische Austellung, 1959, no. 18
Bern, Kunstmuseum, Vlaminck, 1961, no. 134
New York, The Museum of Modern Art; San Francisco Museum of Art; Fort Worth, Kimbell Art Museum, The ”Wild Beasts”: Fauvism and its Affinities, 1975-76
Paris, Musée d'Art moderne de la Ville de Paris, Le fauvisme ou "l'épreuve du feu," 1999-2000, no. 60

Georges Duthuit, The Fauvist Painters, New York, 1950, listed p. 121
Marcel Sauvage, Vlaminck, sa vie et son message, Geneva, 1956, illustrated p. 32
Umbro Apollonio, Fauves et Cubistes, Paris, 1959, illustrated p. 24
Jean-Louis Ferrier, Les Fauves, le règne de la couleur, Paris, 1992, illustrated pp. 106-107

Maurice de Vlaminck's canvases from 1906 are considered among his best.   The year before at the Salon d'Automne, Vlaminck and fellow painters, Matisse and Derain, exhibited a selection of landscapes executed in ferocious strokes of brightly colored paint.  These pictures earned the artists the epithet of "wild beasts," or fauves, from one hostile critic.  The disparaging remark famously backfired, and the Fauve painters attracted the praise and admiration of the avant-garde.  Vlaminck enjoyed this celebrity, sometimes taking sole credit for the founding of this movement in his bolder moments, and in 1906, he received a contract from the dealer Ambroise Vollard.  Thanks to this newfound financial ease and critical acceptance, by 1906 he was free to concentrate on his painting.  "When I had spent a few days without thinking, without doing anything, I would feel a sudden urge to paint," Vlaminck recalled of this time in his life.  "Then I would set up my easel in full sunshine...Vermilion alone could render the brilliant red of the tiles on the opposite slope.  The orange of the soil, the harsh crude colors of the walls and greenery, the ultramarine and cobalt of the sky achieved an extreme harmony that was sensually and musically ordered.  Only the series of colors on the canvas with all their power and vibrancy could, in combination with each other, render the chromatic feeling of that landscape" (quoted in Gaston Diehl, The Fauves, New York, 1975, p. 104).

It is this kind of brilliantly colored landscape that Vlaminck has rendered in Le cirque.  The location of this scene is one of the towns on the Seine, probably near Chatou, where he lived and worked during the first decade of the 20th century.  Vlaminck rarely left this region during his Fauvist years, preferring it over the landscapes of the south of France, favored by Matisse and Derain.  Nevertheless, his daring canvases of Chatou rival even his colleagues' best depictions of Collioure (see fig. 2) and L'Estaque.  The compositions that Vlaminck completed during this time all share certain characteristics, specifically the red-tiled roofs, such as in Paysage près de Chatou (Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam, see fig. 3) and in Bateaux sur la Seine (The Metropolitan Museum of Art, see fig. 4), that the artist mentioned in the above-referenced quote.  But in Le cirque, he adds more specific features to the landscape, primarily the circus tent that appears in the background along the right side of the canvas.  The theme of a circus or carnival is an appropriately spirited subject for this picture, which Vlaminck has executed in an explosion of primary colors.  All of the elements of this composition -- the approaching figure, the distant carriage, the houses, lamp post -- are rendered with extraordinary succinctness.   As a whole, Le cirque reveals Vlaminck's remarkable ability to capture the essence of the landscape and the activity that occurs in it.

Perhaps the most striking feature of this work is Vlaminck's selection of colors.  At this point in his career, the artist still very much favored bright shades of red and yellow that were the hallmarks of a great Fauvist composition.  By 1908, he had adopted a more earth-tone palette that was reminiscent of the work of Cézanne and favored the use of browns and blues.  The Fauvist movement would come to an end at the close of the decade, making way for Vlaminck's exploration of Cubism and his travels to London and Marseilles.  But it is his Fauvist compositions that are considered by many to be his most successful artistic endeavour, as they express the daring creativity and passion of his youth.  Le cirque, completed at the pinnacle of the Fauvist period, is an example of the artist's most inspired and original work.

When Le cirque was exhibited in the important exhibition, The "Wild Beasts": Fauvism and its Affinities, John Elderfield discussed in the exhibition catalogue Vlaminck's use of brilliant colors in the paintings that he completed in 1906. He writes, "Vlaminck's concern with the immediate led him to base his painting around a combination of the three primary colors, especially the cobalts and vermilions with which, he said, he wanted 'to burn down the Ecole des Beaux-Arts' and 'to express by feelings without troubling what painting was like before me.'  As many commentators have pointed out, this sometimes led to a pursuit of self-expression in itself, indifferent to aesthetic standards.  Vlaminck admitted as much, indeed, boasted of it: 'I want to reveal myself to the full, with my qualities and my defects.' It has been written of him that he relied entirely on first impressions, finding no place in his art for revisions of any kind, 'for he did not distinguish between art and life -- and the experiences of life cannot be changed and corrected, only repeated in a different form' " (John Elderfield, The ”Wild Beasts”: Fauvism and its Affinities (exhibition catalogue), The Museum of Modern Art, New York, 1975-76, p. 70-71).

Fig. 1, Photograph of the artist circa 1906.
Fig. 2. André Derain, Vue de Collioure (Collioure, le village et la mer), 1905, oil on canvas, Scottish National Gallery of Modern Art, Edinburgh
Fig. 3, Maurice de Vlaminck, Paysage près de Chatou, 1906, oil on canvas, Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam
Fig. 4, Maurice de Vlaminck, Bateaux sur la Seine, 1906, oil on canvas, The Metropolitan Museum of Art, The Robert Lehman Collection, New York