Dali House

A few days after Henri Matisse came teetering into Gertrude Stein’s apartment in Paris in that 1907 spring with the great lump of a sculpted African torso he’d just bought, making Picasso’s eyes bug out even more than usual, Pablo dragged his pal André Derain over to the Trocadéro Museum of Ethnology, as the Museum of Man at the Palais de Chaillot was then known. It had a 30-year-old collection of the African stuff. It still has (along with René Descartes’ brain, for some reason), but back then the knickknacks of colonialism were all mouldy and neglected, and the Spaniard was miffed in the must.

“I was so depressed that I would have chosen to leave immediately,” Picasso recalled, “but I forced myself to stay.” And stay he did, elevating the centuries-old tribal “objects that people had created with a sacred, magical purpose” into the most modern of all European art forms. Matisse, Braque and Modigliani kept pace with him, re-moulding the rough-hewn angularity into a new way of seeing the world … but what happened to Derain?

André Derain was 27 when Pablo pulled him into the dusty Trocadéro archives. He hailed from Chatou on the Île-de-France, and was going to be an engineer, but then veered into the less reasonable side of design. He took painting classes at the Académie Carrière and sketched up and down the Parisian Seine and at the Louvre, where in 1899 he met an old classmate, Georges Florentin Linaret, who was by then studying under Gustave Moreau, as was Matisse.

To their extraordinary experiments, Derain brought his admiration for Cézanne and, following the 1901 tribute exhibition at Bernheim-Jeune, of Van Gogh. At this show Derain introduced Matisse to Maurice de Vlaminck, with whom he was by then sharing a studio in Chatou in the western suburbs, where the impressionists once conspired at the Maison Fournaise (it’s on the same street as Dali House).

Derain was drafted for a three-year stint with the army, and painted little during that time. Only two of his works have been ascribed to 1903: “The Soldiers’ Ball of Suresnes” (detail here), done while he was on leave, and “Self-portrait in the Studio”, now at the National Gallery of Australia.

The latter was a fast look in the mirror between bugle calls, but thoughtfully composed around flashes of bright hue. Compare that with “Portrait of the Artist” (Minneapolis Institute of Arts) from about a decade later, on the right, and you’ll see where this post is heading.

When Derain was through with marching, Matisse — who found him delightfully open-minded and a solid, quick worker — was ready to talk his parents out of the engineering nonsense altogether and got him into the Académie Julian. Things proceeded apace, a career blossomed, and by 1905 Derain was able to sell everything in his studio to Ambroise Vollard, and he and Matisse spent the summer in Collioure on the overbright southern coast, where they went completely bonkers with the colours.

Derain’s “Portrait of Henri Matisse”

Matisse, on the prowl for pure colour, needed pure light, and he’d heard of other artists tracking it down here (he’d been to Corsica and Saint-Tropez already). Speculation is not unreasonable that, since intense sunlight hides all edges, the blinding illumination with which the Mediterranean is blessed is ideal for watching form disappear. And without form to contain it, colour is free to roam as it chooses.

Matisse’s challenge, which Derain and others accepted as well, was to let colour do all the talking, or at least give the keynote speech, while shapes and outlines sat in the audience dumbstruck at their newfound uselessness. It turned out that colour had a lot to say, on any topic at all. And, to paraphrase Matisse, green didn’t want to talk only about the grass, nor blue about the sky.

Matisse and company would leave it to Picasso and Braque to console the shapes and outlines, though of course that turned out to be like leaving wounded men in the care of tigers.

Matisse arrived in Collioure on the train on May 16 — dressed with supreme anticipation completely in white — and took a room at the Hotel de la Gare, Madame Rosette’s little auberge here on what was then the Avenue de la Gare and is now the Avenue Maillol. Mère Rosette didn’t care for tourists, but Matisse’s beard made him look reasonably dignified. In the Google Earth images here you can see the train station (circled in the upper view), and the Avenue de la Gare descending from it into the foreground.

He’d come without the wife and kids, though, and soon felt lonely, so he put out the word and Derain, portrayed here by Henri, grabbed the bait, arriving in July with his parents’ money in his pocket. They made a beeline down the avenue and the Rue Saint-Sébastien to the beach promenade and snapped up everything along the way, dazzled by a mystic sun.

Between them they produced 242 paintings, drawings and sculptures in a little more than three months, and today tourists retrace their meanderings guided by 20 plaques around the village bearing replicas of their paintings. It’s called the Fauvism Art Trail.

Here’s the beach, which has the Boulevard du Boramar along its length and the old Church of Notre Dame des Anges, with its mediaeval lighthouse at the upper left. Below, two works that Derain painted on this spot.

“The Lighthouse of Collioure”, now at Paris’ Museum of Modern Art

“Le Faubourg de Collioure” from the Centre Pompidou, the “suburb”

For André the Collioure sojourn would last only a summer; Matisse kept coming back until 1914, by which time he was following the sun to Morocco. He would eventually stalk it all the way to Tahiti.

They both stayed at “La Rosette” that summer, but from 1906 to 1914 Matisse and his family had an apartment at the foot of the Boulevard du Boramar, overlooking the harbour, where he would set up the easel and paint the window and the view beyond. Once, when it was nighttime, he painted just the window.

Just along the shore was the Roca-Alta d’en Beille, above which he perched to paint “View of Collioure” in 1907. You can see “the High Rock” among the oak and pine trees of the Bois d’Ambeille, now replaced by private homes, and in the distance red-roofed houses and the village church, Notre-Dame-des-Anges, the tower of which was originally a lighthouse.

This is Matisse’s Henri Matisse’s “Beautiful Summer Morning”, painted that inaugural summer of 1905, which was sold in 2006 for $1.1 million. In all he did 15 oils, 40 watercolours and a hundred drawings that season, every single one a rejection of neo-impressionism in dreamily unnatural colour and, taken together, a monstrous beacon to other artists that Collioure was the place to come.

Braque came for a look, as did Othon Friesz, Charles Rennie Mackintosh and Tsuguharu Foujita (the last was one of strange breed that Dali House visited in “Paris when art really mattered”). In the early 1950s Picasso and his clan were lodged in what is now the 52-room Hotel le Templiers on the Quai de l’Amirauté, where the walls are hung with canvases that the proprietor accepted in lieu of room charges. Between 1953 and 1957 Dali was a Collioure regular — it’s just down the coast from Figueras.

When the Matisse and Derain harvest went on view at that year’s Salon d’Automne, Henri’s picture of his wife, “Woman with the Hat”, had everyone giggling, except for one man who threatened it with a knife. Derain showed “Collioure, Le Faubourg”, seen below, which is now at the Pompidou, among other graphic riots, to similar response.

“Mountains at Collioure”

“View of Collioure”

Art critic Louis Vauxcelles diagnosed them as insane and prescribed incarceration in la cage aux fauves — they were wild beasts with brushes and a rainbow jungle for a palette.

Or, noticing the renaissance statue in the midst of the garish paintings, did he actually say Tiens, Donatello chez les fauves!?

At any rate, even bad publicity is good publicity, and the fauvist movement was born.

The following March, Derain was in London working up 30 urban landscapes on a commission from art dealer Ambroise Vollard, who lusted after the kind of cash that Monet’s travelogue in paint had recently generated (see Dali House’s “Agog in the smog”). Monet must have flipped when he saw Derain’s versions of the familiar landmarks he’d depicted, redecorated in jump-up hues, but they were a hit too.

Derain’s “Portrait of Maurice de Vlaminck” from 1905 and, on the right, Vlaminck returns the compliment a year later.

Meanwhile Vlaminck had also gone mad among the primary colours, but Derain was more restrained, even elegant, in his strokes and more harmonious in his hues, green and blue taking turns dancing with all the violets that cared for a whirl. Below is a detail from his “Les Nymphes” of 1905, just one part of the dance.

“La danseuse ou la femme en chemise” from 1906, now at the Statens Museum for Kunst in Copenhagen

The Gauguin retrospective at the first Salon d’Automne in 1906 laid out the future strategy for he and Matisse even more clearly. By now Derain had taken a shine to symbolist poetry and become close to Max Jacob, André Salmon and Guillaume Apollinaire. Like Matisse, Apollinaire loved Derain’s liveliness and his ability to drink other men under the table, and yet still carry on working.

Derain met Braque and Picasso at the Bateau-Lavoir in the Rue Ravignan and in 1907, when another dealer, Daniel-Henry Kahnweiler, made Derain a made man by buying all of his work, he moved from Chatou to the Rue Tourlaque to be closer to the Montmartre revolution. That year Derain’s “Bathers”, reproduced below, was painted, at about the same time as Picasso’s “Demoiselles d’Avignon”, which now hangs not far from it in New York’s Museum of Modern Art. Picasso was living with Fernande Olivier, who admired André’s “English chic” but didn’t seem sure about his red and green neckties and his arguments at the drop of a felt hat.

Picasso must have calmed him down, though — and that little stroll to Africa they shared no doubt helped. The beastly colours settled into Cézanne-esque muted tones and the drawing was decidedly primitive. En route to burying himself in the distant past, Derain was in a hurry to get all of modernity on the same canvas, with visits to all impressionists and those who came after. “The Bathers” summarises his hurry to synthesise.

Detail from “Self-portrait with a Floppy Hat”

Derain illustrated Apollinaire’s first book of prose and Max Jacob’s poetry, and exhibited abroad, including at the great 1913 Armory Show in New York. But then Derain started to worry about his technique, and decided to haunt the Louvre and see how the Renaissance Italians had managed. Cézanne (Dali House biography here) pulled him back long enough for a long conversation with cubism, but he didn’t hang around. History beckoned louder. He didn’t want to be a painter “of his time”, he said, but “of all time”.

“Girl in Black”, left — bled of all colour, as if in a shroud dusty with the powder of ruins — and a detail from the strikingly African-mask-style “Portrait of a Girl in Black”, both from 1913 and both at the Hermitage in St Petersburg. Nine years later the latter was among several Derain paintings sold at the first auction of French modern art ever held in the United States. It commanded $100.

Newly, and happily, lost among the old masters, Derain washed down his colours even more and weakened his lines, and then he was back in uniform for World War I. He survived, as did his so-called “gothic” sensibilities, and he led the charge in revitalising classicism. About 1915 his portrait was done by Lou Albert-Lasard (1885-1969). Known as Lou-Lou or Loulou, she was the mistress of Rainer Maria Rilke at the time. Another of Rilke’s women was the mother of Balthus, who would also be painting Derain soon.

In 1920 came the picture at the top of this post, “Portrait of Madame Carco”, which is now at the Kunstmuseum in Basle. It’s been likened to mummy portraits that the Romans once made in Faiyum, Egypt, the old Crocodilopolis. The occupiers, who preferred cremation, were fascinated by the Egyptians’ lingering practice of burying the dead, and painted death masks on wood in a pigmented wax technique called encaustic.

Derain spent part of 1921 — the quatercentenary of Raphael’s death — in Rome, pursuing the same mastery of the line, even as Picasso and Braque pulled art further and further away from Renaissance affectations. The Quattrocento, the Bolognese and Pompeii persuaded him that he was a realist at heart, a tamed ex-fauve, and that once-omnipotent colour ran a distant second to structure. From Caravaggio to Corot, he sought out order and sobriety amid the kinetic cacophony of the day.

A detail from the magnificent but sad “Harlequin and Pierrot” from 1924, which is at the Musée de l’Orangerie in Paris. They move synchronously yet silently, playing stringless instruments.

Living in the Rue Bonaparte, Derain was never short of admirers — both the eager dealers and the young lions of Montparnasse, painters and poets alike, including André Breton. They worshipped at his altar a world that was spiritual and material in equal parts, with art as the unifying conduit.

“Portrait of Madame Paul Guillaume in a Large Hat” from 1928. That was the year that Derain moved to a studio he had built in the Rue Douanier, close to Montsouris Park, and Braque worked in the same building. The street is now the Rue Braque. Derain’s new dealer Paul Guillaume, famously painted by Modigliani as well as Derain, brought his wife Domenica there to pose. He died prematurely, and later Domenica and her second husband John Walter donated his collection to the Orangerie, including this portrait.

It was Paul Guillaume who introduced Derain to the performing arts, and he was soon designing the scenes for Serge Diaghilev’s “Boutique Fantasque”. The wild animal now a sop for tradition, happy to concoct ballet sets, and always welcome, from Berlin to London to Cincinnati, Ohio.

The Nazi generals thought he was great and treated him to an official visit to Germany in 1941 for an exhibition of work by Arno Brecker (the sculptor who would later do a bust of Dali, as described in the Dali House biography here). Derain was lucky that his head didn’t get shaved when the whole thing was over, but the Polish/French iconoclast Balthasar Kłossowski de Rola, known as Balthus, who was close to Derain in the early 1930s and had picked up some technical advice from him, was among those who saw no collaboration.

Balthus convinced Nicholas Fox Weber, who published “Balthus: A Biography” in 2000, that Derain had been unfairly denigrated, that he was “forced” to make the trip to Germany, as was Picasso, and “was actually trying to obtain freedom for certain Jewish artists, including Leopold Levy whom he roomed with”. Balthus — who was, of course, was widely seen as an anti-Semite (as well as a pervert) — did the 1936 portrait of Derain shown here. The woman in the picture appears to be Balthus’ frequent model and first wife, Antoinette de Watteville.

If bad karma was due, it eventually finds it own path, and in 1954 André Derain — with the befuddled eyes and mind of a septuagenarian — was run over by a car in Garches on the Île-de-France, not far from where he was born. It was, of course, “an accident”. He died a few weeks later, on September 8, from shock, as it were.

This is where Derain lived for his last 19 years. He bought La Roseraie, the 17th-century former home of France’s foreign minister, in July 1935 — using its more recently added rotunda as his studio. Braque, Balthus, Giacometti, Paul Poiret, Jean Renoir and Ambroise Vollard came to visit.

His widow Alice lived here until her death in 1975 at the age of 91, and then his niece and sometime model Genevieve Taillade remained another dozen years, maintaining the living and dining rooms and the adjacent rotunda as they were in the painter’s day. Surgeon Albert Badault became the new owner in 1988 and decided to open those sections of the house to the public, under the supervision of the Friends of Andre Derain, a group founded in 1983.

Photos of the studio from the website of the Maison André Derain.

Here, on the eve of World War II, Derain began his last monumental works, among them “The Return of Ulysses”, a Last Supper rendered as Homeric banquet, and created small clay sculptures using earth from his garden. These masks and figurines were “rediscovered” after his death and cast in bronze. Also on view in the house are several unfinished sculptures made from sheets of metal that he did just before his death.

In his day Derain was simultaneously derided for his apostasy and called “the greatest living French painter”. But in 1916 Apollinaire, who was so often allowed the last word, wrote that, “With unparalleled courage, ignoring all the audacities of contemporary art, he found in freshness and simplicity the principles and the rules of art.”

“His work may look like a product of the brain, like a technical exercise,” Victor Spahn has written, “but when his hand lets itself go there is such fantasy, such easy grace!”

“The Painter and his Family” from 1939, at the Tate Gallery