Derain, André

Derain, André (1880–1954). French painter, printmaker, theatrical designer, and sculptor, born at Chatou on the outskirts of Paris, the son of a prosperous pastrycook. In 1898–9 he studied at the Académie Carrière, where he became a friend of Matisse, and in 1900 he met Vlaminck, with whom he shared a studio for a while. From 1901 to 1904 he did his military service and had little time for painting, but after leaving the army he was soon at the heart of avant-garde developments and made a major impact in the art world. In 1905 Ambroise Vollard bought the entire contents of his studio and later that year he was one of the painters who gave birth to Fauvism at the Salon d'Automne. A good example of his Fauve period is his portrait of Matisse (1905) in the Tate Gallery, London; the Tate also has Matisse's portrait of Derain, executed at the same time, when they were painting together at Collioure, near the Mediterranean border with Spain. In 1907 he signed a contract with Kahnweiler (Braque's and Picasso's dealer) and by the following year had moved away from the brilliant colours of Fauvism to a style influenced by Cubism. His friends in the Cubist circle included Apollinaire, whose first book, L'Enchanteur pourrissant (1909), he illustrated with woodcuts. However, his links with Cubism were fairly short-lived, and by 1911 he was painting pictures whose archaic stylization reflect the influence of Byzantine art. Another aspect of his involvement in the avant-garde during this period of vigorous experimentation was his interest in African sculpture—like his friend Vlaminck he was a pioneer collector of such primitive art (his own main contribution to sculpture is that he was one of the pioneers of direct carving in stone).

Throughout the First World War Derain served in the French army. He was able to do very little artistic work in this period, but his first one-man show was held in 1916, at the Galerie Paul Guillaume, Paris. After he was discharged from the army in 1919 he rapidly picked up his successful career again, beginning with the design of La Boutique fantastique (1919) for Diaghilev's Ballet Russes. In the 1920s he moved away from his pre-war experimentation to a much more conservative style reflecting his admiration for the Old Masters. The works he painted in this manner (including landscapes, portraits, still-lifes, and nudes) made him wealthy and famous (he exhibited widely abroad), but they dismayed many supporters of avant-garde art. He polarized opinion so much that in January 1931 the periodical Les Chroniques du jour published a feature entitled ‘André Derain: Pour ou Contre'. Among the people quoted in this was Jacques-Émile Blanche, who—even though he was a fairly conservative painter himself—wrote: ‘Youth has departed: what remains is a highly cerebral and rather mechanical art.’ Those quoted in favour of Derain included André Salmon.

In 1935 Derain bought a large country house at Chambourcy, near St Germain-en-Laye. He kept a flat in Paris (partly as a place to entertain his mistresses), but by this time he had lost touch with many of his friends from his avant-garde days. During the German occupation of France in the Second World War, his country house was requisitioned and he lived mainly in Paris. Because he was now seen as a great upholder of the classical tradition, his art was viewed sympathetically by the Nazis, who courted him for propaganda purposes. In 1941, with Vlaminck and other artists, he visited Germany, where his ‘only function was to smile for the newsreel cameras under the eye of the ever-present Gestapo officers’ ( Jane Lee, Derain, 1990). Because of this visit, he was ostracized by many French people after the war, even though ‘Braque publicly upbraided the scandalmongers’ and ‘to Derain's Jewish friends of many years, any suggestion of sympathy with the Germans was ridiculous’ ( Lee). He continued to have a versatile and prosperous career, his work including a good deal of stage design, but in his final years he became reclusive and his relationship with his wife deteriorated. They separated soon before his death, which followed a stroke and a road accident. The differences of opinion he had provoked in his life continued after his death. Many critics think that his work after the First World War was essentially a long anti-climax, but some admirers have thought extraordinarily highly of him, notably Giacometti, who wrote in 1957: ‘Derain excites me more, has given me more and taught me more than any painter since Cézanne; to me he is the most audacious of them all.’ Two years later John Canaday summed up the situation in his book Mainstreams of Modern Art: ‘His detractors think of him as a parasite on both the past and the present, but … some critics award Derain unique status as the only twentieth-century painter to achieve an individual compound of the great tradition of French culture as a whole with the spirit of his own time … This opinion is particularly held in France—where, of course, it is most legitimate.’