Word: vlaminck
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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Gauguin, Dufy, Vlaminck. Their masterpieces split the gloom of the gallery with a luminosity that never glowed from any canvas that had been brushed with paint. They were not paintings, but transcriptions of paintings done in a new technique -and there were signs that they might be here to stay...
...channel to a new freedom in 20th century art, a fact strikingly demonstrated by the two hit shows of the current Paris season: a two-month-long retrospective of the late Russian-born Chaim Soutine, and the current full-scale retrospective for doughty, 80-year-old Maurice de Vlaminck...
Wildest Beast. By contrast to Soutine. Vlaminck leaves no doubt of his initial debt to Van Gogh. Recalling the day he saw his first Van Gogh oils. Vlaminck says: "When I left that gallery, I loved Van Gogh more than my own father.'' Vlaminck, onetime bicycle racer, nightclub fiddler and casual Sunday painter, began turning out paintings in pure, clashing colors that made him, along with Matisse, one of the leaders of the fauve (wild beast) school, and as Derain said, "the wildest of the beasts...
After a brief skirmish with cubism, Vlaminck in 1924 began striking out against the current trend, retired to Normandy and started painting the dozens of landscapes, golden wheat fields and chilly, windswept winter scenes (opposite) that earned him the title, "poet of stormy skies." Vlaminck today has nothing but contempt for most modern art, calls Picasso "the gravedigger of French art." Says he: "I still look at things with the eyes of my childhood; I am still moved by the same old sights: a forest path, a long country road flanked by poplars, the banks of a river...
Tricks & Skids. Willem de Kooning's Gotham News uses just about every trick in painting, except illusion, to create excitement. It is juicy à la Rubens, gaudy à la Delacroix, emphatic à la Vlaminck -and utterly ambiguous. Being too agitated for the purposes of either decoration or contemplation, De Kooning's canvas reaffirms the abstract-expressionist credo that the very effort of painting is what paintings should be about. The observer's glance is led to skid here and there in the calculated mess like brush strokes; looking at the picture is supposed to re-create...