Maurice de Vlaminck

Emile Sabouraud, Paris

Boris J. Fize (Fisz), Paris (by 1951)

Private Collection (sold: Paris, Laurin, Guilloux, Buffetaud,  June 21, 1999, lot 77)

Acquired at the above sale by the present owner

Paris, Salon d'Automne, La Cage aux Fauves, 1905, no. 1580

Paris Musée National d'Art Moderne, Le Fauvisme, 1951, no. 134 (as dating from circa 1910)

Paris, Galerie Charpentier, L'Oeuvre de Vlaminck, du Fauvisme à nos jours, 1956, no. 4

Brussels, Palais International des Beaux-Arts, 50 ans d'Art Moderne, 1958, no. 337

Paris, Galerie Charpentier, Les Fauves, 1962, no. 132

Paris, Galerie Max Kaganovitch, Oeuvres choisies de 1900 à nos jours, 1964, no. 69

Paris, Galerie de Paris, La Cage aux Fauves du Salon d'Automne de 1905, 1965

Paris Galerie Schmit, Cent ans de peinture française, 1969, no. 129

New York, Museum of Modern Art, The Wild Beasts: Fauvism and Its Affinities, 1976

Los Angeles County Museum of Art; New York, The Metropolitan Museum of Art; London, The Royal Academy of Arts, The Fauve Landscape, 1990-91, no. 71

Paris, Musée d'Art Moderne de la Ville de Paris, Le Fauvisme ou l'épreuve du feu, Eruption de la modernité en Europe, 1999-2000

Paris, Grand Palais, Les Fauves, 2000

Marcel Sauvage, Vlaminck, sa vie et son message, Geneva, 1956, no. 4, catalogued p. 109;  illustrated pl. 4 (catalogued incorrectly as not signed)

Jean Leymarie, Le Fauvisme, Geneva, 1959, illustrated p. 43

Renata Negri, Matisse e i Fauves, Milan, 1967, illustrated pl. IX

L'Étang de Saint-Cucufa, one of five paintings by Vlaminck included in the Fauve's 1905 debut exhibition in Paris, is filled with a vibrancy and exuberance that characterizes the greatest paintings of the movement.  This work was completed in 1903, two years before Louis Vauxcelles derided the outrageously colorful canvases of Vlaminck, Matisse, Derain, and Braque on display at the Salon d’Automne as the rantings of 'fauves' or 'wild beasts' (see figs. 1, 2, 3, 4).  The critic's outcry over this very painting and the others in the exhibition effectively inaugurated the Fauves as leaders of early 20th century avant-garde painting.   For four years following the completion of L'Étang de Saint-Cucufa, Vlaminck and his colleagues continued to flood their compositions with bold color, creating an aesthetic that would later launch the color revolution of the German Expressionists.

The scene depicted here is the pond of Saint-Cucufa, a wooded area on the outskirts of Paris.  What makes this picture so extraordinary is the unrestrained use of color that Vlaminck has used to render the landscape.  For all the Fauves, color was the means of expressing emotion.  But of all of the Fauve painters, Vlaminck was perhaps one of the most vocal about the trans-sensory impact of a vibrant palette.  He would frequently use musical and visual qualifiers interchangeably in his descriptions of his art, enabling him to express the powerful, multi-sensual experience he attempted to convey in his paintings. "When I had spent a few days without thinking, without doing anything, I would feel a sudden urge to paint," Vlaminck  once recalled of this period.  "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 colours 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 colours 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).

Writing about the present work and the other compositions that Vlaminck created during these first few months of his Fauvist endeavor, John Elderfield considered the painter’s artistic process and his approach to color: "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 my feelings without troubling what painting was like before me”’  (John Elderfield in The Wild Beasts: Fauvism and Its Affinities (exhibition catalogue), The Museum of Modern Art, New York, p. 71). 

The first owner of record of this picture was Emile Sabouraud (1900-1996), the French painter whose colorful compositions are largely indebted to the accomplishments of the Fauves.  After Sabouraud, the picture was owned by Boris Fize, an important Russian collector living in Paris in the 1950s.

This work has been requested for the forthcoming exhibition on Vlaminck's work at the Musée du Luxembourg, Paris, to be held from February 20 through July 20, 2008.

Fig. 1, Poster for the 1905 Salon d'Automne, which came to be known as the first exhibition of the Fauves

Fig. 2, Maurice de Vlaminck, Dans le jardin de mon père, 1904-05, oil on canvas, National Museum Belgrade

Fig. 3, Henri Matisse, La Fenêtre, 1905, oil on canvas, National Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C., former collection of Mr. and Mrs. John Hay Whitney

Fig. 4, André Derain, Le Séchage des voiles, 1905, oil on canvas, State Pushkin Museum, Moscow