Andre Derain

André Derain (Chatou, June 10, 1880-Garches, September 8, 1954) was a French painter, illustrator and set designer, representative of Fauvism.

Derain was eighteen years old when he entered the Carriere Academy, where he met Henri Matisse and Maurice de Vlaminck. In 1905 these painters exhibited at the Autumn Salon together with their colleagues Georges Rouault and Henri Manguin, being the first exhibition of the Fauvist group, in which emotion was expressed with color. He was also a decorator and costume designer for ballet and theater and a collector of works of art.

He was the soul of Fauvism with his penchant for nuance, his impetuous youth and feverish perseverance. Derain demonstrated his receptivity to the new dogma of "form through colour" by admiring Vincent van Gogh and Paul Cézanne. He made a series of paintings in this style, first in Collioure, in 1905, and then in London in 1906, among which he painted "A Hyde Park Corner", "Westminster Bridge" and "London Bridge". In early 1908, without reason or explanation, he vandalized his work, and devoted himself to painting landscapes similar to those of Cézanne. For a short interval he leaned towards the cubist style. After World War I, Derain turned to classical drawing, which is why he carefully followed Camille Corot's sketches, and also produced a considerable body of work. A controversial and very famous painter in his lifetime, his work went through several very different periods and was later criticized for his return to pictorial forms considered "traditional"; and accused of collaborationism during the Vichy France regime.

Trajectory

The son of a pastry chef, after finishing high school he abandoned his projected career in engineering for painting. He began to paint in 1895 and in 1898-99 he enrolled in the Camillo Academy and during his regular visits to the Louvre he met Henri Matisse.

Together with Maurice de Vlaminck, he belonged to the Chatou School and joined the Fauves group, creators of fauvism. He was influenced by cubism and primitivism and was a great friend of Henri Matisse and Pablo Picasso with whom he lived for a time in Montmartre.

In 1916, gallery owner Paul Guillaume gave him his first solo exhibition in his gallery with a foreword by Guillaume Apollinaire and illustrated Mont de Piete by André Breton. He served in World War I in the Vosges and was stationed in Mainz until 1919.

His fame grew by winning the Carnegie Prize in 1928 with exhibitions in London, Berlin, Frankfurt am Main and Düsseldorf in 1929 and in New York and Cincinnati in 1930-1931. His nudes, London landscapes and spontaneous compositions make him famous, although in the 1920s he moves away from Fauvism towards a more traditional classicism, which brings him criticism.

He moves to Chambourcy with his wife Alice Princet and their daughter, moving away from his group of friends and intellectuals who end up harshly criticizing him.

The German occupation of France began its fall. The Nazis admired him and the foreign minister, Ribbentrop, asked him to paint his family. Derain refuses but accepts an invitation to Berlin in 1941 that will be publicized by the German government and that after the Liberation will forever damage his image. He will have to face the courts before serious accusations of collaborationism.

In 1947 he designed the sets for a ballet at London's Covent Garden and at the Aix-en-Provence Festival: those for The Kidnapping in the Seraglio by Mozart and The Barber of Seville by Rossini, in 1947 and 1953 respectively.

He illustrated editions of Rabelais's Pantagruel in 1943, Oscar Wilde's theatrical drama Salome (1938) and Petronius's Satiricon in 1934 This last series did not get to finish it, and it was published late.

He returned to Chambourcy on very bad terms with his wife Alice; the painter had two children with models, and the couple ended up divorcing amid bitter legal disputes. He died after being hit by a truck in Garches.

Posts

• André Derain: The London Paintings Paul Holberton Publishing; (2006) ISBN 1-903470-44-7
• Andre Derain, Gaston Diehl, BONFINI PRESS 1973 ISBN 978-0-568-00113-8 ISBN 0-568-00113-3
• Andre Derain. Denys Sutton, The Phaidon Press, London 1959
• Andre Derain: Le Peintre Du "Trouble Moderne", Andre Musee D'Art Moderne De La Ville De Paris Derain Editors1994 ISBN 978-2-87900-176-0 ISBN 2-87900-176-5
• Andre Derain - A Painter Through the Ordeal by Fire, Nina Kalitina, Parkstone Press Ltd 1999 ISBN 978-1-85995-084-5 ISBN 1-85995-084-1