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Lot Essay
Le Comité Derain a confirmé l'authenticité de cette oeuvre.
This free and lively gouache is a study for L'Âge d'Or, the most monumental and ambitious canvas that André Derain painted in 1905, the year in which the incendiary colors of Fauvism took the art world by storm and propelled the impetuous young Derain and his more seasoned compatriot Matisse to the forefront of the Parisian avant-garde. "Fauvism was our ordeal by fire," Derain later wrote about this first real revolution in the development of twentieth-century art. "Colors became charges of dynamite. They were expected to discharge light" (quoted in D. Sutton, André Derain, London, 1959, p. 20). In L'Âge d'Or, Derain took up the venerable theme of the Ovid's Golden Age, encapsulating its paradisiacal spirit in an ensemble of seductive nudes and exultant dancers, set in a lush landscape and rendered in sweeping arabesques. Whereas Matisse's contemporaneous and closely related idyll Le bonheur de vivre exudes a sense of bucolic leisure and Apollonian composure, Derain's vision of the Golden Age is one of exotic revelry and frenzied, Dionysian ecstasy. "L'Âge d'Or is more Fauve, more wild, in its conception," John Elderfield has proclaimed, "than any of the landscapes Derain made in 1905" (The "Wild Beasts": Fauvism and Its Affinities, New York, 1976, p. 105).
Derain's move to artistic maturity over the course of that single fabled year was swift and decisive. In the fall of 1904, at age twenty-four, he had ended his three years of compulsory military service and resumed painting alongside Vlaminck, his best friend and sole partner in the self-styled School of Chatou. Soon, however, he began to gravitate towards Matisse, eleven years his senior, who, while still struggling financially and yet to solidify his place in the avant-garde, already moved in progressive circles. "Derain increasingly showed himself ready to match Matisse in ambition," Elderfield has written, "and even at times in advance of him" (ibid., p. 34). At Matisse's suggestion, Derain submitted eight paintings to the Salon des Indépendants in the spring of 1905, where they hung in the same room as Matisse's own Divisionist manifesto Luxe, calme et volupté. Four of the eight paintings sold, and at solid prices; shortly thereafter, Derain's bourgeois parents dropped their staunch resistance to their son's chosen career path. The young artist, passionate and determined, was launched.
In July 1905, Derain accepted Matisse's invitation to join him at Collioure, a remote fishing village in the foothills of the Pyrenées where he and his wife Amélie had been since May. "I cannot insist too strongly that a stay here is absolutely necessary for your work," Matisse wrote to Derain (quoted in H. Spurling, The Unknown Matisse: A Life of Henri Matisse, The Early Years, New York, 1999, p. 316). In fact, the sojourn at sun-drenched Collioure would utterly transform the work of both artists. Within a few weeks, painting side-by-side, they broke free from the constraints of Divisionism and advanced to a hitherto unknown liberty in art, applying pure, unmodulated pigments in brash, irregular strokes and patches. When Derain and Matisse exhibited the products of this spectacular summer at the 1905 Salon d'Automne, it caused an immediate sensation, challenging and even outraging viewers. The critic Louis Vauxcelles dubbed the two hot young painters and their cohort les fauves ("the wild beasts") - a sobriquet or an epithet, depending on one's point of view at the time, that stuck hard and fast.
Derain worked on his monumental oil L'Âge d'Or throughout this momentous year. The divisionist handling suggests that he began the painting in the spring, likely in response to Matisse's Luxe, calme et volupté (Musée d'Orsay, Paris). He left the canvas behind in his studio when he went south in July, but it was never far from his mind; in a letter to Vlaminck from Collioure, he mentions having multiple studies in train for his "grande toile," as he called it. "I will never have made a work as complex and as different, as disconcerting for the critics" (in P. Dagen, ed., André Derain, Lettres à Vlaminck, Paris, 1994, p. 170). He resumed work on the two-meter canvas in the fall, around the same time that Matisse began his own Golden Age tableau, Le bonheur de vivre. The heightened palette is now that of Collioure, and the red foreground nudes bear the unmistakable stamp of Gauguin, whose primitive pastorals Derain had studied over the summer in Daniel de Monfreid's collection. Derain had initially envisioned L'Âge d'Or as the centerpiece of his submission to the Salon d'Automne, but the painting was not ready in time. Even without it, however, Derain made quite a splash, and the dealer Vollard - always on the lookout for the latest shining talent of the avant-garde - put him under contract before the Salon even closed. The present study includes almost all the figures from the final version of L'Âge d'Or. The two willowy revelers in the center are there, their white skirts billowing cabaret-style as they kick up their heels; so are the rosy-ring of dancers in the back right, the Ingresque bathers that frame the scene, and the two reclining nudes in the foreground, the one on the left covering her face in melodramatic distress (or perhaps it is ecstasy). Only the third foreground figure is missing, and in her stead Derain has added a wanton, sun-kissed nude who leaps with euphoric abandon across the center of the scene. The oil painting features an almost Nietzschean opposition between the flat, dark-toned, somewhat sinister foreground and the brilliantly lit, more spacious central zone; in the present sheet, the bold contrast of complementaries - light orange against deep blue - expresses this same duality elegantly and succinctly. Where the oil has a certain stiffness inherent in the Divisionist technique, however, this study is freely brushed and graceful in its formal idiom, preserving all the freshness and immediacy of Derain's work from Collioure.
With its heightened palette, exotic overtones, and intentionally disjointed, dream-like structure, L'Âge d'Or represents a radically anti-classical re-working of a theme - the Golden Age - with a long and illustrious lineage in western art, from Giorgione and Bellini to Ingres and Puvis de Chavannes. Derain, of course, was not the first artist to update the iconography of the idyll for modern times: Signac and Cross had imagined flourishing anarchist utopias on the shores of the Mediterranean, and Gauguin had located the Golden Age in the geographically distant paradise of Tahiti and the Marquesas Islands. Yet Derain's blatant transgressions of the genre's classical conventions would have had particular significance in 1905, the very moment that the deeply conservative Action Française was promoting classicism as a national value. "Derain's canvas would have challenged the idea that the mythical past offered a model of classical order to which the decadent present should return," James Herbert has concluded. "From this perspective Derain, even more than Matisse, had violated the promise of a calm and hierarchical Latin past in favor of the pleasures of exotic intoxication" (Fauve Painting: The Making of Cultural Politics, New Haven, 1992, p. 139).
Cette gouache libre et pleine de vie est une étude pour L'âge d'or, le tableau le plus monumental et le plus ambitieux peint par André Derain en 1905. La meme année, les couleurs incendiaires du fauvisme prennent le monde d'assaut et propulse un Derain jeune et impétueux et Matisse, son compatriote plus établi, en premières lignes de l'avant-garde parisienne. "Le fauvisme a été notre épreuve du feu", écrit Derain plus tard à propos de cette première véritable révolution dans l'art du XXe siècle. "Les couleurs sont devenues des charges de dynamite. Elles doivent émettre de la lumière" (cité in D. Sutton, André Derain, London, 1959, p. 20). Dans L'âge d'or, Derain reprend le thème ancien de l'âge d'or d'Ovide et encapsule son esprit paradisiaque dans un ensemble de nus séduisants et de danseurs triomphants dans un cadre luxuriant, rendus en vastes arabesques. Alors que le pendant peint par Matisse, Le bonheur de vivre, exhale un sentiment de loisirs bucoliques et de calme apollinien, la vision de l'âge d'or de Derain renvoie aux festivités exotiques et à un extase dionysiaque frénétique. "L'âge d'or est de conception plus fauve, plus sauvage", proclame John Elderfield, "qu'aucun des autres paysages de Derain faits en 1905" (The "Wild Beasts": Fauvism and Its Affinities, New York, 1976, p. 105).
L'évolution de Derain vers la maturité au cours de cette seule année, restée légendaire, est rapide et déterminante. À l'automne 1904, âgé de vingt-quatre ans, il termine ses trois ans de service militaire obligatoire et reprend la peinture auprès de Vlaminck, son meilleur ami et seul autre membre de ce que tous deux appellent l'École de Chatou. Il se tourne rapidement vers Matisse, son ainé de onze ans, qui bien que déjà actif dans les cercles progressistes, se trouve dans une situation financière fragile et doit assurer sa place à l'avant-garde. "Derain se montre de plus en plus prêt à faire preuve d'autant d'ambition que Matisse", écrit Elderfield, "et même parfois davantage que lui" (ibid., p. 34). À l'initiative de Matisse, Derain présente huit tableaux au Salon des Indépendants au printemps de 1905, qui sont accrochés dans la même salle que le manifeste divisionniste de Matisse Luxe, calme et volupté (Musée d'Orsay, Paris). Quatre des huit tableaux sont vendus pour de bons prix; peu après, la famille bourgeoise de Derain renonce à s'opposer à la voie choisie par leur fils. La carrière de ce jeune artiste passionné et déterminé est lancée.
En juillet 1905, Derain accepte l'invitation de Matisse à Collioure, un petit village de pêche au pied des Pyrénées, où il est avec sa femme Amélie depuis le mois de mai. "Je ne peux pas assez insister qu'un séjour ici est absolument indispensable pour votre travail", écrit Matisse à Derain (cité in H. Spurling, The Unknown Matisse: A Life of Henri Matisse, The Early Years, New York, 1999, p. 316). En fait, le séjour inondé de soleil à Collioure va complètement transformer l'oeuvre des deux artistes. En quelques semaines, peignant côte à côte, ils se libèrent des contraintes du divisionnisme et avancent vers une liberté artistique inconnue jusque-là, appliquant les pigments purs en touches irrégulières et hardies. Quand Derain et Matisse exposent les créations de cet été spectaculaire au Salon d'Automne de 1905, elles font immédiatement sensation, défient les spectateurs ou les scandalisent. Le critique Louis Vauxcelles baptise alors les deux jeunes peintres et leur groupe les fauves.
Derain travaille sur sa monumentale toile L'âge d'or tout au long de cette année essentielle. Le traitement divisionniste suggère qu'il a commencé le tableau au printemps, probablement en réponse au Luxe, calme et volupté de Matisse. Si la toile reste dans son atelier alors qu'il part vers le sud en juillet, elle reste très présente à son esprit; dans une lettre à Vlaminck écrite de Collioure, il mentionne plusieurs études en cours pour sa "grande toile", comme il l'appelle. "Je n'ai jamais fait d'oeuvre aussi complexe et aussi différente, aussi déconcertante pour les critiques" (in P. Dagen, ed., André Derain, Lettres à Vlaminck, Paris, 1994, p. 170). Il reprend le travail sur sa toile de deux mètres, à peu près au moment où Matisse commence son propre tableau représentant l'âge d'or Le bonheur de vivre. La palette plus intense est maintenant celle de Collioure et les nus du premier-plan portent l'empreinte caractéristique de Gauguin, dont Derain a étudié les pastorales primitives au cours de l'été dans la collection de Daniel de Montfreid. À l'origine, Derain envisage L'âge d'or comme la pièce majeure du prochain Salon d'Automne, mais le tableau n'est pas prêt à temps. Même absent, Derain fait sensation et le marchand Vollard, toujours à l'affut de nouveaux talents à l'avant-garde, lui propose un contrat avant même la fin du Salon.
This free and lively gouache is a study for L'Âge d'Or, the most monumental and ambitious canvas that André Derain painted in 1905, the year in which the incendiary colors of Fauvism took the art world by storm and propelled the impetuous young Derain and his more seasoned compatriot Matisse to the forefront of the Parisian avant-garde. "Fauvism was our ordeal by fire," Derain later wrote about this first real revolution in the development of twentieth-century art. "Colors became charges of dynamite. They were expected to discharge light" (quoted in D. Sutton, André Derain, London, 1959, p. 20). In L'Âge d'Or, Derain took up the venerable theme of the Ovid's Golden Age, encapsulating its paradisiacal spirit in an ensemble of seductive nudes and exultant dancers, set in a lush landscape and rendered in sweeping arabesques. Whereas Matisse's contemporaneous and closely related idyll Le bonheur de vivre exudes a sense of bucolic leisure and Apollonian composure, Derain's vision of the Golden Age is one of exotic revelry and frenzied, Dionysian ecstasy. "L'Âge d'Or is more Fauve, more wild, in its conception," John Elderfield has proclaimed, "than any of the landscapes Derain made in 1905" (The "Wild Beasts": Fauvism and Its Affinities, New York, 1976, p. 105).
Derain's move to artistic maturity over the course of that single fabled year was swift and decisive. In the fall of 1904, at age twenty-four, he had ended his three years of compulsory military service and resumed painting alongside Vlaminck, his best friend and sole partner in the self-styled School of Chatou. Soon, however, he began to gravitate towards Matisse, eleven years his senior, who, while still struggling financially and yet to solidify his place in the avant-garde, already moved in progressive circles. "Derain increasingly showed himself ready to match Matisse in ambition," Elderfield has written, "and even at times in advance of him" (ibid., p. 34). At Matisse's suggestion, Derain submitted eight paintings to the Salon des Indépendants in the spring of 1905, where they hung in the same room as Matisse's own Divisionist manifesto Luxe, calme et volupté. Four of the eight paintings sold, and at solid prices; shortly thereafter, Derain's bourgeois parents dropped their staunch resistance to their son's chosen career path. The young artist, passionate and determined, was launched.
In July 1905, Derain accepted Matisse's invitation to join him at Collioure, a remote fishing village in the foothills of the Pyrenées where he and his wife Amélie had been since May. "I cannot insist too strongly that a stay here is absolutely necessary for your work," Matisse wrote to Derain (quoted in H. Spurling, The Unknown Matisse: A Life of Henri Matisse, The Early Years, New York, 1999, p. 316). In fact, the sojourn at sun-drenched Collioure would utterly transform the work of both artists. Within a few weeks, painting side-by-side, they broke free from the constraints of Divisionism and advanced to a hitherto unknown liberty in art, applying pure, unmodulated pigments in brash, irregular strokes and patches. When Derain and Matisse exhibited the products of this spectacular summer at the 1905 Salon d'Automne, it caused an immediate sensation, challenging and even outraging viewers. The critic Louis Vauxcelles dubbed the two hot young painters and their cohort les fauves ("the wild beasts") - a sobriquet or an epithet, depending on one's point of view at the time, that stuck hard and fast.
Derain worked on his monumental oil L'Âge d'Or throughout this momentous year. The divisionist handling suggests that he began the painting in the spring, likely in response to Matisse's Luxe, calme et volupté (Musée d'Orsay, Paris). He left the canvas behind in his studio when he went south in July, but it was never far from his mind; in a letter to Vlaminck from Collioure, he mentions having multiple studies in train for his "grande toile," as he called it. "I will never have made a work as complex and as different, as disconcerting for the critics" (in P. Dagen, ed., André Derain, Lettres à Vlaminck, Paris, 1994, p. 170). He resumed work on the two-meter canvas in the fall, around the same time that Matisse began his own Golden Age tableau, Le bonheur de vivre. The heightened palette is now that of Collioure, and the red foreground nudes bear the unmistakable stamp of Gauguin, whose primitive pastorals Derain had studied over the summer in Daniel de Monfreid's collection. Derain had initially envisioned L'Âge d'Or as the centerpiece of his submission to the Salon d'Automne, but the painting was not ready in time. Even without it, however, Derain made quite a splash, and the dealer Vollard - always on the lookout for the latest shining talent of the avant-garde - put him under contract before the Salon even closed. The present study includes almost all the figures from the final version of L'Âge d'Or. The two willowy revelers in the center are there, their white skirts billowing cabaret-style as they kick up their heels; so are the rosy-ring of dancers in the back right, the Ingresque bathers that frame the scene, and the two reclining nudes in the foreground, the one on the left covering her face in melodramatic distress (or perhaps it is ecstasy). Only the third foreground figure is missing, and in her stead Derain has added a wanton, sun-kissed nude who leaps with euphoric abandon across the center of the scene. The oil painting features an almost Nietzschean opposition between the flat, dark-toned, somewhat sinister foreground and the brilliantly lit, more spacious central zone; in the present sheet, the bold contrast of complementaries - light orange against deep blue - expresses this same duality elegantly and succinctly. Where the oil has a certain stiffness inherent in the Divisionist technique, however, this study is freely brushed and graceful in its formal idiom, preserving all the freshness and immediacy of Derain's work from Collioure.
With its heightened palette, exotic overtones, and intentionally disjointed, dream-like structure, L'Âge d'Or represents a radically anti-classical re-working of a theme - the Golden Age - with a long and illustrious lineage in western art, from Giorgione and Bellini to Ingres and Puvis de Chavannes. Derain, of course, was not the first artist to update the iconography of the idyll for modern times: Signac and Cross had imagined flourishing anarchist utopias on the shores of the Mediterranean, and Gauguin had located the Golden Age in the geographically distant paradise of Tahiti and the Marquesas Islands. Yet Derain's blatant transgressions of the genre's classical conventions would have had particular significance in 1905, the very moment that the deeply conservative Action Française was promoting classicism as a national value. "Derain's canvas would have challenged the idea that the mythical past offered a model of classical order to which the decadent present should return," James Herbert has concluded. "From this perspective Derain, even more than Matisse, had violated the promise of a calm and hierarchical Latin past in favor of the pleasures of exotic intoxication" (Fauve Painting: The Making of Cultural Politics, New Haven, 1992, p. 139).
Cette gouache libre et pleine de vie est une étude pour L'âge d'or, le tableau le plus monumental et le plus ambitieux peint par André Derain en 1905. La meme année, les couleurs incendiaires du fauvisme prennent le monde d'assaut et propulse un Derain jeune et impétueux et Matisse, son compatriote plus établi, en premières lignes de l'avant-garde parisienne. "Le fauvisme a été notre épreuve du feu", écrit Derain plus tard à propos de cette première véritable révolution dans l'art du XXe siècle. "Les couleurs sont devenues des charges de dynamite. Elles doivent émettre de la lumière" (cité in D. Sutton, André Derain, London, 1959, p. 20). Dans L'âge d'or, Derain reprend le thème ancien de l'âge d'or d'Ovide et encapsule son esprit paradisiaque dans un ensemble de nus séduisants et de danseurs triomphants dans un cadre luxuriant, rendus en vastes arabesques. Alors que le pendant peint par Matisse, Le bonheur de vivre, exhale un sentiment de loisirs bucoliques et de calme apollinien, la vision de l'âge d'or de Derain renvoie aux festivités exotiques et à un extase dionysiaque frénétique. "L'âge d'or est de conception plus fauve, plus sauvage", proclame John Elderfield, "qu'aucun des autres paysages de Derain faits en 1905" (The "Wild Beasts": Fauvism and Its Affinities, New York, 1976, p. 105).
L'évolution de Derain vers la maturité au cours de cette seule année, restée légendaire, est rapide et déterminante. À l'automne 1904, âgé de vingt-quatre ans, il termine ses trois ans de service militaire obligatoire et reprend la peinture auprès de Vlaminck, son meilleur ami et seul autre membre de ce que tous deux appellent l'École de Chatou. Il se tourne rapidement vers Matisse, son ainé de onze ans, qui bien que déjà actif dans les cercles progressistes, se trouve dans une situation financière fragile et doit assurer sa place à l'avant-garde. "Derain se montre de plus en plus prêt à faire preuve d'autant d'ambition que Matisse", écrit Elderfield, "et même parfois davantage que lui" (ibid., p. 34). À l'initiative de Matisse, Derain présente huit tableaux au Salon des Indépendants au printemps de 1905, qui sont accrochés dans la même salle que le manifeste divisionniste de Matisse Luxe, calme et volupté (Musée d'Orsay, Paris). Quatre des huit tableaux sont vendus pour de bons prix; peu après, la famille bourgeoise de Derain renonce à s'opposer à la voie choisie par leur fils. La carrière de ce jeune artiste passionné et déterminé est lancée.
En juillet 1905, Derain accepte l'invitation de Matisse à Collioure, un petit village de pêche au pied des Pyrénées, où il est avec sa femme Amélie depuis le mois de mai. "Je ne peux pas assez insister qu'un séjour ici est absolument indispensable pour votre travail", écrit Matisse à Derain (cité in H. Spurling, The Unknown Matisse: A Life of Henri Matisse, The Early Years, New York, 1999, p. 316). En fait, le séjour inondé de soleil à Collioure va complètement transformer l'oeuvre des deux artistes. En quelques semaines, peignant côte à côte, ils se libèrent des contraintes du divisionnisme et avancent vers une liberté artistique inconnue jusque-là, appliquant les pigments purs en touches irrégulières et hardies. Quand Derain et Matisse exposent les créations de cet été spectaculaire au Salon d'Automne de 1905, elles font immédiatement sensation, défient les spectateurs ou les scandalisent. Le critique Louis Vauxcelles baptise alors les deux jeunes peintres et leur groupe les fauves.
Derain travaille sur sa monumentale toile L'âge d'or tout au long de cette année essentielle. Le traitement divisionniste suggère qu'il a commencé le tableau au printemps, probablement en réponse au Luxe, calme et volupté de Matisse. Si la toile reste dans son atelier alors qu'il part vers le sud en juillet, elle reste très présente à son esprit; dans une lettre à Vlaminck écrite de Collioure, il mentionne plusieurs études en cours pour sa "grande toile", comme il l'appelle. "Je n'ai jamais fait d'oeuvre aussi complexe et aussi différente, aussi déconcertante pour les critiques" (in P. Dagen, ed., André Derain, Lettres à Vlaminck, Paris, 1994, p. 170). Il reprend le travail sur sa toile de deux mètres, à peu près au moment où Matisse commence son propre tableau représentant l'âge d'or Le bonheur de vivre. La palette plus intense est maintenant celle de Collioure et les nus du premier-plan portent l'empreinte caractéristique de Gauguin, dont Derain a étudié les pastorales primitives au cours de l'été dans la collection de Daniel de Montfreid. À l'origine, Derain envisage L'âge d'or comme la pièce majeure du prochain Salon d'Automne, mais le tableau n'est pas prêt à temps. Même absent, Derain fait sensation et le marchand Vollard, toujours à l'affut de nouveaux talents à l'avant-garde, lui propose un contrat avant même la fin du Salon.