Annotated Mona Lisa, The - Strickland, Carol.original_ [99]
Physically a big man who was extremely sure of himself, Vlaminck in his life and art was the wildest beast in the Fauve jungle. He taught boxing, played the violin in seedy cafés, and wrote soft-core porno novels. A self-taught artist, he bragged that he never set foot in the Louvre. Overwhelmed by the 1901 van Gogh show, Vlaminck, with his friend Derain, started squeezing paint on the canvas straight from the tube, smearing the bold colors thickly with a palette knife. He placed daubs of clashing colors side by side to intensify their effect, making his exuberant landscapes seem to vibrate with motion. A favorite subject was the bridge at Chatou, the Paris suburb where he lived, portrayed at a sharp tilt with thick, expressive brushwork.
DERAIN: FIREWORKS. André Derain (pronounced duh REN; 1880-1954) was the quintessential Fauve. He reduced his brushstrokes to Morse code: dots and dashes of burning, primary colors exploding, he said, like “charges of dynamite.”
Derain pioneered strong color as an expressive end in itself. His bold, directional brushstrokes eliminated lines and the distinction between light and shade. In his harbor and beach scenes, the differing strokes — from choppy to flowing — give a sense of movement to sky and water.
For the first two decades of the twentieth century, Derain was at the avant-garde hub, a creator of Fauvism and an early Cubist. He later turned to the Old Masters for inspiration and his work became dry and academic. The sculptor Giacometti visited Derain, who had clearly outlived his fame, on his deathbed. When asked if he wanted anything, Derain replied, “A bicycle and a piece of blue sky.”
Derain, “Big Ben,” 1905, Troyes, Private collection. Derain applied bright, clashing colors with expressive brushstrokes to distort reality — the identifying marks of Fauvism.
DUFY : FAUVE’S ANIMATOR. It’s been said one can hear tinkling champagne glasses when looking at Raoul Dufy’s (pronounced Doo FEE; 1877-1953) pictures. His cheerful canvases of garden parties, concerts, horse races, regattas, and beach scenes on the coast of Normandy are undeniably fashionable. Yet Dufy was more than a mere entertainer and chronicler of the rich. His drawing was so fluid, his colors so vivacious, that he never failed to animate a scene with charm.
Everything came easily to Dufy. As a student at the École des Beaux-Arts, he found drawing with his right hand too facile, so he switched to the left, which he eventurally came to prefer. Passionate about music, he closed his eyes while listening to an orchestra and visualized colors like the crimson and rose that saturate his paintings.
Although Expressionism (distorting an object’s actual appearance to relay an artist’s emotional response) is usually associated with violent, perverse subjects, Dufy proved it could be jovial. He used intense colors that have nothing to do with an object’s appearance but everything to do with his own outlook. When accused of neglecting natural appearance in his painting, he said, “Nature, my dear sir, is only a hypothesis.” Dufy’s pleasure-soaked paintings of the life of leisure were immensely popular and helped win acceptance for his fellow Fauves.
ROUAULT: STAINED GLASS PAINTINGS. Georges Rouault (pronounced Roo OH; 1871-1958) worked with the Fauves briefly and shared with them technical traits like expressive brushwork and glowing color. Yet, while the other Fauves painted urbane, joyous canvases, his were filled with pain and suffering.
A devout Catholic, Rouault’s lifelong concern was to redeem humanity through exposing evil. In his early work, he concentrated on condemning prostitutes and corrupt judges with savage, slashing brushstrokes. Later he portrayed sad circus clowns and finally, after 1918, virtually all his work was on religious subjects, especially the tragic face of Christ. Rouault’s “passion,” he believed, was best “mirrored upon a human face.”
As a youth, Rouault apprenticed with a stained glass maker and repaired medieval cathedral windows. The heavy, black lines