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Lot Essay
The Fauvist painter André Derain spent the summer of 1907 in Cassis, a small fishing town in Southern France. The dramatic geography of Cassis, marked by steep limestone cliffs and undulating hills, provided intrepid climbers with sweeping views of the coastal village: a charming cluster of terracotta roofs, nestled alongside the turquoise waters of the Mediterranean Sea. It is from one such elevated vantage point that Derain painted the brilliantly-colored oil on canvas, Paysage à Cassis.
In the present work, Derain embraced certain traditional aspects of the landscape genre: he observed the coastline from atop a gently sloping hill, his view of the water framed by intervening trees. Though this subject was somewhat typical of late nineteenth-century landscapes, Derain’s approach to painting was anything but standard. Each of the aforementioned pictorial elements are significantly flattened; it is only through their overlapping forms, arranged in precise relation to one another, that we are able to understand the recession of space. In his deliberate reduction of form and careful construction of perspective, Derain was certainly influenced by the painter Paul Cézanne. Derain had encountered Cézanne’s landscapes when they were exhibited at the Salon d’Automne of 1904; thereafter he closely studied the older artist’s abstract experiments in modeling volume and space. By 1907, the year after Cézanne’s death, Derain regularly incorporated those formal lessons into his own work.
Unlike Cézanne or any of the other Impressionist painters, however, Derain was not interested in adhering to nature’s own color palette—nor was he concerned with objectively recording natural phenomena. Instead, Derain invested his work with expressive shocks of color, which explicitly defied convention. The ground of Paysage à Cassis, for example, is comprised of surges of mango, coral and blood orange, which seem to flow like lava towards the pale, silvery sea. These hot bursts of pigment further contrast with the linear strokes of bright blue and green that form the bark of the pine trees.
Derain first began to play with sensational color alongside his friend and occasional rival, Henri Matisse. Derain and Matisse had trained together with the painter Eugène Carrière at the Académie Camillo in Paris. In the summer of 1905, Matisse and Derain spent several months together in the seaside town of Collioure, in the Pyrénées-Orientales region of Southern France. The two artists challenged each other to render the surrounding landscape with increasingly hallucinatory hues. Though clearly inspired by the dazzling colors of the Mediterranean coast, Matisse and Derain liberated themselves from the burden of precisely reproducing nature. The brilliant works that Derain painted thereafter, including Paysage à Cassis, convey this profound new sense of artistic freedom. A work such as La mer vue de Collioure (The Barnes Foundation, Philadelphia) demonstartes the shared approach the two artists shared in their approach to the landscape.
For Derain and his cohort, color was nothing short of a revolution, which would upend French academic painting; as Derain’s colleague Maurice de Vlaminck later declared, “I wanted to burn down the École des Beaux-Arts with my cobalts and vermilions, I wanted to express my feelings with my brushes without troubling what painting was like before me” (quoted in J. Leymarie, Fauves and Fauvism, 1987, p. 36). However, not everyone shared the feverish excitement of these young artists. After they exhibited their earliest color experiments at the 1905 Salon d’Automne, the art critic Louis Vauxcelles famously compared Derain, Matisse and Vlaminck to wild beasts, or "Fauves" in French—inadvertently coining the term Fauvism to describe their short-lived but highly influential artistic movement. Indeed, after Derain, modern painting would never be the same again.
The provenance of this work is well documented. Soon after its execution, the painting was acquired from the artist by the German gallerist Daniel-Henry Kahnweiler. In 1921, it was included in the first of the dealer’s sequestration sales, where it was bought by the legendary Parisian dealer René Gimpel. After the Germans entered Paris in 1940, Gimpel fled to the south of France. He was forced to sell the present work between 1940 and 1942; Gimpel was thereafter detained by the French Vichy government and died while imprisoned at Neuengamme in Germany. The work was subsequently acquired by Augustin Terrin, before it entered the collection of the city of Marseille in 1987; it was thereafter on extended loan to the Musée Cantini. Given the circumstances of Gimpel’s sale of the painting, Paysage à Cassis was restituted in the Gimpel family in January 2021.
In the present work, Derain embraced certain traditional aspects of the landscape genre: he observed the coastline from atop a gently sloping hill, his view of the water framed by intervening trees. Though this subject was somewhat typical of late nineteenth-century landscapes, Derain’s approach to painting was anything but standard. Each of the aforementioned pictorial elements are significantly flattened; it is only through their overlapping forms, arranged in precise relation to one another, that we are able to understand the recession of space. In his deliberate reduction of form and careful construction of perspective, Derain was certainly influenced by the painter Paul Cézanne. Derain had encountered Cézanne’s landscapes when they were exhibited at the Salon d’Automne of 1904; thereafter he closely studied the older artist’s abstract experiments in modeling volume and space. By 1907, the year after Cézanne’s death, Derain regularly incorporated those formal lessons into his own work.
Unlike Cézanne or any of the other Impressionist painters, however, Derain was not interested in adhering to nature’s own color palette—nor was he concerned with objectively recording natural phenomena. Instead, Derain invested his work with expressive shocks of color, which explicitly defied convention. The ground of Paysage à Cassis, for example, is comprised of surges of mango, coral and blood orange, which seem to flow like lava towards the pale, silvery sea. These hot bursts of pigment further contrast with the linear strokes of bright blue and green that form the bark of the pine trees.
Derain first began to play with sensational color alongside his friend and occasional rival, Henri Matisse. Derain and Matisse had trained together with the painter Eugène Carrière at the Académie Camillo in Paris. In the summer of 1905, Matisse and Derain spent several months together in the seaside town of Collioure, in the Pyrénées-Orientales region of Southern France. The two artists challenged each other to render the surrounding landscape with increasingly hallucinatory hues. Though clearly inspired by the dazzling colors of the Mediterranean coast, Matisse and Derain liberated themselves from the burden of precisely reproducing nature. The brilliant works that Derain painted thereafter, including Paysage à Cassis, convey this profound new sense of artistic freedom. A work such as La mer vue de Collioure (The Barnes Foundation, Philadelphia) demonstartes the shared approach the two artists shared in their approach to the landscape.
For Derain and his cohort, color was nothing short of a revolution, which would upend French academic painting; as Derain’s colleague Maurice de Vlaminck later declared, “I wanted to burn down the École des Beaux-Arts with my cobalts and vermilions, I wanted to express my feelings with my brushes without troubling what painting was like before me” (quoted in J. Leymarie, Fauves and Fauvism, 1987, p. 36). However, not everyone shared the feverish excitement of these young artists. After they exhibited their earliest color experiments at the 1905 Salon d’Automne, the art critic Louis Vauxcelles famously compared Derain, Matisse and Vlaminck to wild beasts, or "Fauves" in French—inadvertently coining the term Fauvism to describe their short-lived but highly influential artistic movement. Indeed, after Derain, modern painting would never be the same again.
The provenance of this work is well documented. Soon after its execution, the painting was acquired from the artist by the German gallerist Daniel-Henry Kahnweiler. In 1921, it was included in the first of the dealer’s sequestration sales, where it was bought by the legendary Parisian dealer René Gimpel. After the Germans entered Paris in 1940, Gimpel fled to the south of France. He was forced to sell the present work between 1940 and 1942; Gimpel was thereafter detained by the French Vichy government and died while imprisoned at Neuengamme in Germany. The work was subsequently acquired by Augustin Terrin, before it entered the collection of the city of Marseille in 1987; it was thereafter on extended loan to the Musée Cantini. Given the circumstances of Gimpel’s sale of the painting, Paysage à Cassis was restituted in the Gimpel family in January 2021.