Biographie

1876–1958

Mau­rice de Vlam­inck was born 1876 into a fam­i­ly of Flem­ish ori­gin, in the pic­turesque town of Vésinet, locat­ed on the riv­er Seine, West of Paris. Musi­cian and keen sports­man, Mau­rice de Vlam­inck paint­ed as an auto­di­dact. Encour­aged by André Derain, whom he met dur­ing his mil­i­tary ser­vice in Brit­tany, Vlam­inck decid­ed to ded­i­cate his life to paint­ing in the ear­ly 1900s. The two men became firm friends and took a stu­dio togeth­er on’île de Cha­tou’, the scenic island in the riv­er Seine favoured by the Impressionists.
Here, Derain made him dis­cov­er the paint­ing of Van Gogh whom Galerie Bern­heim hon­oured with a one-man-show in 1901. The rad­i­cal new paint­ing of Van Gogh would prove a last­ing influ­ence on the auto­di­dact Vlam­inck. Nat­u­ral­ly, Vlam­inck exhib­it­ed at the infa­mous Room VII of the 1905 Salon d’Automne, which was dubbed ‘La Cage aux Fauves’ and as such marked the offi­cial start of Fau­vism. Here Vlam­inck showed five oil paint­ings along­side Hen­ri Matisse, André Derain, Hen­ri Man­guin, Charles Camoin and Albert Marquet.
Vlaminck’s paint­ings are marked by his nat­ur­al instinct for pure colour which he used in an untamed man­ner. Hav­ing lit­tle inter­est in advanced com­po­si­tion, Vlam­inck was high­ly invest­ed in spa­tial per­cep­tion and the affec­tive qual­i­ties of colour.
From 1906, Vlam­inck became rep­re­sent­ed by the leg­endary deal­er Ambroise Vol­lard who organ­ised a one-man show in 1908.
In 1907, the Salon d’Automne, paid a posthu­mous homage to Paul Cézanne, whose sin­gu­lar style inspired the young fau­vist painters, lead­ing to the use of the term ‘cézan­nisme’. Dur­ing a short peri­od, Vlam­inck prac­ticed Pro­to-Cubism, emu­lat­ing Cézanne’s reduc­tion of vol­umes to pure geo­met­ric shapes, paired with a toned-down colour palette.
Affect­ed by the hor­rors of the First World War, Vlam­inck became increas­ing­ly soli­tary, insist­ing on his aver­sion towards art schools and the intel­lec­tu­al­i­sa­tion of artis­tic prac­tice. Whilst som­bre colours start­ed to appear in his paint­ing, Vlam­inck also pur­sued his lit­er­ary work.
In 1925, Vlam­inck set­tled with his new wife and daugh­ters in la Touril­lière, a remote prop­er­ty in the agri­cul­tur­al Eure et Loire depart­ment. Attract­ed by the light and the delights of soli­tude, Vlam­inck lived there in peace, sur­round­ed by his fam­i­ly and his beloved ani­mals, until his death in 1958.