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Lot Essay
In the first decade of his career, André Derain embraced the landscape of rural France—as had the Barbizon school and Impressionist painters who came before him. Derain distinguished himself from his predecessors, however, in his dramatically simplified compositions and color palettes. Rather than capturing the ephemeral atmospheric effects of sun, cloud, wind or rain, Derain distilled the most essential colors and shapes. In his 1907 Paysage à Cassis, for example, Derain observed the swelling topography of Cassis, a small fishing village near the city of Marseilles. Those forested hills, quirky pine trees and yellow limestone cliffs, gilded by sunset, are all reduced to colorful silhouettes.
In reducing volumetric forms into two-dimensional shapes, Derain generalized the specific landscape of Cassis, investing the scene with a timeless universality and eternal stillness. As Christopher Green noted of French modernist landscapes, “the places they painted are treated not as important in their own right, but merely as points of departure for those new ways of seeing and painting” (“A Denationalized Landscape? Braque's Early Cubist Landscapes and Nationalist Geography” in Studies in the History of Art, 2005, vol. 68, p. 243). It was this flattening of the landscape that would similarly come to define the work of Richard Diebenkorn. Enormously inspired by Derain’s fauvist comrade, Henri Matisse, Diebenkorn frequently explored the abstract potential of the landscape. In a work such as the 1957 Freeway and Aqueduct, Diebenkorn has treated the landscape in a similar way to Derain, structuring it as planes of color, which serve to invest the scene with same sense of stillness and monumentality as the present work.
For Derain, bold colors and simple, organic shapes were the primary lenses through which he saw the world and reinvented it in paint. As the artist later reflected, “Fauvism was our ordeal by fire… It was the era of photography. This may have influenced us and played a part in our reaction against anything resembling a snapshot of life. No matter how far we moved away from things, it was never far enough. Colors became charges of dynamite” (quoted in G. Duthuit, The Fauvist Painters, New York, 1950, p. 29).
As well as the work of Paul Cézanne, Derain’s highly original painting style was somewhat indebted to the stylized landscapes of Georges Seurat and Vincent van Gogh. While his predecessors applied pigment in meticulous dots or voluptuous waves, Derain favored a bolder, blockier approach in Paysage à Cassis. His blues, yellows and greens are modulated by thick, painterly brushstrokes, the raw edges of which Derain did not bother to disguise. These shards of color are further outlined in black, mimicking the effect of cloisonné—a decorative technique in which segments of colored glass are arranged in figurative shapes or abstract patterns, delineated by thin metal wires. Around 1907, Derain’s Fauvist contemporary, Matisse, was experimenting with a similar composition: his Paysage de Collioure, now at The Metropolitan Museum of Art, was widely referred to as Le Vitrail (The Stained Glass).
With its near total collapse of three-dimensional space into flat planes of color, Paysage à Cassis prefigured the more rigid geometricity of Cubism—notably, the work of Georges Braque, with whom Derain was well acquainted. As with the cubist painters who would follow in his wake, Derain clearly understood the abstract potential of the landscape, and was unafraid to bend nature to suit his artistic aims. The critic François Crucy observed that among the new crop of avant-garde painters who exhibited their work at the 1906 Salon des Indépendants, two distinct groups emerged: “those who ask of the spectacle of nature pretexts to realize decorative compositions and those who try and directly fix…the impressions the spectacle makes on them” (quoted in R. Benjamin, “The Decorative Landscape, Fauvism, and the Arabesque of Observation” in The Art Bulletin, June 1993, vol. 75, no. 2, pp. 295-296). Derain undoubtedly belonged to the former category.
Paysage à Cassis has been widely exhibited, featured in a number of shows dedicated to the artist and to the Fauvist movement throughout the twentieth century. This work was acquired by René Gimpel from Daniel-Henry Kahnweiler via Hôtel Drouot in 1921. In June 1940, when the Germans entered Paris, Gimpel fled to the south of France. He was forced to sell the work between 1940 and 1942; and was later deported to the German concentration camp at Neuengamme and died there in 1945. This painting remained in a private collection until it was gifted to the French state in 1976. Paysage à Cassis was on long-term loan to the Musée d’Art Moderne in Troyes, until it was restituted to the family of René Gimpel in November 2020.
In reducing volumetric forms into two-dimensional shapes, Derain generalized the specific landscape of Cassis, investing the scene with a timeless universality and eternal stillness. As Christopher Green noted of French modernist landscapes, “the places they painted are treated not as important in their own right, but merely as points of departure for those new ways of seeing and painting” (“A Denationalized Landscape? Braque's Early Cubist Landscapes and Nationalist Geography” in Studies in the History of Art, 2005, vol. 68, p. 243). It was this flattening of the landscape that would similarly come to define the work of Richard Diebenkorn. Enormously inspired by Derain’s fauvist comrade, Henri Matisse, Diebenkorn frequently explored the abstract potential of the landscape. In a work such as the 1957 Freeway and Aqueduct, Diebenkorn has treated the landscape in a similar way to Derain, structuring it as planes of color, which serve to invest the scene with same sense of stillness and monumentality as the present work.
For Derain, bold colors and simple, organic shapes were the primary lenses through which he saw the world and reinvented it in paint. As the artist later reflected, “Fauvism was our ordeal by fire… It was the era of photography. This may have influenced us and played a part in our reaction against anything resembling a snapshot of life. No matter how far we moved away from things, it was never far enough. Colors became charges of dynamite” (quoted in G. Duthuit, The Fauvist Painters, New York, 1950, p. 29).
As well as the work of Paul Cézanne, Derain’s highly original painting style was somewhat indebted to the stylized landscapes of Georges Seurat and Vincent van Gogh. While his predecessors applied pigment in meticulous dots or voluptuous waves, Derain favored a bolder, blockier approach in Paysage à Cassis. His blues, yellows and greens are modulated by thick, painterly brushstrokes, the raw edges of which Derain did not bother to disguise. These shards of color are further outlined in black, mimicking the effect of cloisonné—a decorative technique in which segments of colored glass are arranged in figurative shapes or abstract patterns, delineated by thin metal wires. Around 1907, Derain’s Fauvist contemporary, Matisse, was experimenting with a similar composition: his Paysage de Collioure, now at The Metropolitan Museum of Art, was widely referred to as Le Vitrail (The Stained Glass).
With its near total collapse of three-dimensional space into flat planes of color, Paysage à Cassis prefigured the more rigid geometricity of Cubism—notably, the work of Georges Braque, with whom Derain was well acquainted. As with the cubist painters who would follow in his wake, Derain clearly understood the abstract potential of the landscape, and was unafraid to bend nature to suit his artistic aims. The critic François Crucy observed that among the new crop of avant-garde painters who exhibited their work at the 1906 Salon des Indépendants, two distinct groups emerged: “those who ask of the spectacle of nature pretexts to realize decorative compositions and those who try and directly fix…the impressions the spectacle makes on them” (quoted in R. Benjamin, “The Decorative Landscape, Fauvism, and the Arabesque of Observation” in The Art Bulletin, June 1993, vol. 75, no. 2, pp. 295-296). Derain undoubtedly belonged to the former category.
Paysage à Cassis has been widely exhibited, featured in a number of shows dedicated to the artist and to the Fauvist movement throughout the twentieth century. This work was acquired by René Gimpel from Daniel-Henry Kahnweiler via Hôtel Drouot in 1921. In June 1940, when the Germans entered Paris, Gimpel fled to the south of France. He was forced to sell the work between 1940 and 1942; and was later deported to the German concentration camp at Neuengamme and died there in 1945. This painting remained in a private collection until it was gifted to the French state in 1976. Paysage à Cassis was on long-term loan to the Musée d’Art Moderne in Troyes, until it was restituted to the family of René Gimpel in November 2020.