This biography from the Archives of AskART:
|  Maurice Vlaminck and Andre Derain were good friends and neighbors in
France; they made a spectacular pair. Both were huge and both
wore conspicuous clothes. One of Vlaminck's favorite items of
costume was a painted wooden necktie. They lived and worked in a
seaside suburb called Chatou and invited Matisse to visit them
there. Thus began one of the most fruitful associations in modern
French art: Fauvism.
Despite their friendship there were wide
differences in their personalities as well as many similarities.
Vlaminck claimed to despise intellectual pursuits; Derain read
enormous numbers of books. Vlaminck called Derain "a hot-house
plant"; Derain's father forbade his son to bring Vlaminck to
their house.
Vlaminck was about twenty-five at the time; he was
already married and had two children. He took life a great deal
more lightly than the others; he had no money. He was a
red-headed colossus, well known as a boxer and a wrestler. He
supported himself and his family partly as a violinist, sometimes
posing as a gypsy, and by writing pulp novels that skirted the
boundaries of pornography. He was a blatant self-promoter who
painted in furious bursts, often spreading the oil paint on directly
from the tubes. By the age of thirty, he had attained heights he never
regained in a long lifetime of painting.
After a brief skirmish
with Cubism, Vlaminck began striking out against the current
trend. He retired to Normandy and started painting the dozens of
landscapes, golden wheat fields and chilly, wind-swept winter scenes
that earned him the title "poet of stormy skies".
Submitted August 2004 by Jean Ershler Schatz, artist and researcher from Laguna Woods, California.
Sources include:
The World of Matisse by John Russell, Time-Life Library of Art
Time Magazine, May 24, 1968 |
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