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拍品專文
This free and lively watercolor was painted in 1906, immediately following the revolutionary 1905 exhibition at the Salon d’Automne. In 1905, the incendiary colors of Fauvism took the art world by storm and propelled the impetuous young Derain and his more seasoned compatriot Henri Matisse to the forefront of the Parisian avant-garde. “Fauvism was our ideal by fire,” Derain later wrote. “Colors became charges of dynamite. They were expected to discharge light” (quoted in D. Sutton, André Derain, London, 1959, p. 20). In Le Repos, Derain refers to the venerable theme of Ovid’s Golden Age, encapsulating its paradisiacal spirit in an ensemble of seductive nudes set in a lush landscape and rendered in sweeping arabesques.
Derain’s move towards artistic maturity over the course of the previous year was swift and decisive. In the fall of 1904, at the age of twenty four, he had ended his three years of compulsory military service and resumed painting alongside Maurice de Vlaminck, his best friend and sole partner in the self-styled School of Chatou. Soon, Derain began to gravitate towards Matisse, eleven years his senior, who was still struggling financially and had yet to solidify his place in the avant-garde. “Derain increasingly showed himself ready to match Matisse in ambition,” John Elderfield has written, “and even at times in advance of him” (The “Wild Beasts”: Fauvism and its Affinities, New York, 1976, p. 105). 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 and thus the young artist focused evermore on painting.
In July 1905, Derain accepted Matisse’s invitation to join him at Collioure, a remote fishing village in the Pyrenées. "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").
On the heels of the momentous year, Derain painted this dreamlike composition with its heightened palette, exotic overtones and disjointed structure. It presents a radical view of the classical bather theme. Derain was not the first to confront the subject in modern times: Paul Signac and Henri-Edmond Cross had imagined flourishing anarchist utopias on the shores of the Mediterranean and Paul Gauguin had painted similar scenes in the geographically distant paradise of Tahiti and the Marquesas Islands. Yet Derain’s blatant transgressions of the genre’s classical conventions had particular significance during a moment of conservativism. His works from 1905-1906 “would have challenged the idea that the mythical past offered a model of classical order to which the decadent present would 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).
Derain’s move towards artistic maturity over the course of the previous year was swift and decisive. In the fall of 1904, at the age of twenty four, he had ended his three years of compulsory military service and resumed painting alongside Maurice de Vlaminck, his best friend and sole partner in the self-styled School of Chatou. Soon, Derain began to gravitate towards Matisse, eleven years his senior, who was still struggling financially and had yet to solidify his place in the avant-garde. “Derain increasingly showed himself ready to match Matisse in ambition,” John Elderfield has written, “and even at times in advance of him” (The “Wild Beasts”: Fauvism and its Affinities, New York, 1976, p. 105). 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 and thus the young artist focused evermore on painting.
In July 1905, Derain accepted Matisse’s invitation to join him at Collioure, a remote fishing village in the Pyrenées. "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").
On the heels of the momentous year, Derain painted this dreamlike composition with its heightened palette, exotic overtones and disjointed structure. It presents a radical view of the classical bather theme. Derain was not the first to confront the subject in modern times: Paul Signac and Henri-Edmond Cross had imagined flourishing anarchist utopias on the shores of the Mediterranean and Paul Gauguin had painted similar scenes in the geographically distant paradise of Tahiti and the Marquesas Islands. Yet Derain’s blatant transgressions of the genre’s classical conventions had particular significance during a moment of conservativism. His works from 1905-1906 “would have challenged the idea that the mythical past offered a model of classical order to which the decadent present would 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).