André Derain

André Derain (1880-1954) was considered by leading critics in the 1920s to be the most outstanding French avant-garde painter and at the same time the upholder of the classical spirit of French tradition.

André Derain was born on June 10, 1880, in Chatou. He began to paint when he was about 15. He studied at the Academy Carrière in Paris (1898-1899), where he met Henri Matisse. Derain was a close friend of Maurice Vlaminck, with whom he shared a studio in 1900 and also his radical views on painting, literature, and politics. Derain was drawn, through Vlaminck and Matisse, into the art movement known as Fauvism.

Derain's first artistic attempts were interrupted by military service (1901-1904), after which he devoted himself exclusively to art. He experienced impressionism, divisionism, the style of Paul Gauguin and Vincent Van Gogh, and Vlaminck's and Matisse's techniques by applying them to his own work. He copied in the Louvre and traveled a great deal in France to paint its various landscapes. He spent the summer of 1905 at Collioure with Matisse and that fall exhibited with the Fauves.

The art dealer Ambrose Vollard signed a contract with Derain in 1905, and the following year the artist went to London to paint some scenes of the city commissioned by Vollard. Derain's Westminster Bridge is one of his Fauve masterpieces.

About 1908 Derain became interested in African sculpture and at the same time explored the work of Paul Cézanne and early cubism. He became a friend of Pablo Picasso and worked with him in Catalonia in 1910.

In Derain's work, which comprises landscapes, figure compositions (sometimes religious), portraits, still lifes, sculptures, decors for ballets, and book illustrations, we can discern various periods, all of which are distinguished by masterpieces. About 1911 he was attracted by Italian and French primitive masters; he also admired the "primitive" art of Henri Rousseau. After World War I, during which Derain served at the front, he studied the masters of the early Renaissance and then Pompeian art. All these left traces in his work. Finally he emerged as a realist and intensified his contact with nature. In rejecting the cerebral art of cubism and abstraction, he defended the return of the human figure to painting. His development as an artist was dramatic, and although Picasso called him a guide de musées, in other words, not an innovator but a traditionalist, Derain's best work will survive many of the experimental attempts of his contemporaries because of its inherent painterly qualities.

Toward the end of his life Derain lived, practically forgotten, in his country home at Chambourcy. The retrospective exhibition in Paris in 1937 was the climax of his fame. He died in Garches on Sept. 2, 1954. The large retrospective exhibitions organized from 1955 to 1959 established a new appreciation of Derain as a major artist.

Further Reading

Denys Sutton, André Derain (1959), gives an objective picture of Derain's development and the attitude of critics to his work. Other monographs are Malcolm Vaughan, Derain (1941), and Gaston Diehl, Derain (trans. 1964).

Additional Sources

Lee, Jane, Derain, Oxford: Phaidon; New York: Universe, 1990. □

Derain, André (1880–1954). French painter, printmaker, theatrical designer, and sculptor. In the first two decades of the 20th century he was near the centre of avant-garde developments in Paris: he was one of the creators of Fauvism, an early adherent of Cubism, and one of the first to ‘discover’ primitive art. However, 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 those 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.’ The differences of opinion he had provoked in his life continued after Derain's death. Many critics think that his work after the First World War was essentially a long anticlimax, 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 the American critic John Canaday (1907–85) 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.’

André Derain , 1880–1954, French painter. He studied for a short time under Carrière. Derain's friendship with Vlaminck and Matisse led to his association c.1905 with the fauves. Forceful in his application of pure, bright patches of color, he was for a while prominent as an exponent of fauvism . His portrait of Matisse (1905; Philadelphia Mus. of Art) is a characteristic fauvist composition. Early in his career, however, Derain revealed a tendency toward an architectonic arrangement of forms, and his art gradually assumed a more conservative expression. He was influenced by African art and the work of French and Italian primitives. Derain is well represented in American collections, including the Lyman Allyn Museum, New London, Conn., and the Art Institute, Chicago.

Bibliography: See study by D. Sutton (1959).