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Maurice Vlaminck

By Fritz Vanderpyl

Vlaminck belongs with Henri Matisse and André Derain with Dunoyer de Segonzac, Friesz, Dufy, Bracque, Marquet, Rouault, and Jean Marchand, to the better known painters of the present French school.

Born in the years of impressionism (1876) when Monet, Renoir, and Sisley were waiting for their days of glory, he did not take a very active part in its reaction, called vaguely Cubism. But just the same he was influenced by that reaction.

Since 1900 exposing at the Salon des Indépendants, indifferent to all technique, his atavism, coming from a northern source, pushed him to the rude sentimentalism and manner of masters like Rembrandt and Frans Hals. But French by three generations (his ancestors were from Flanders and Holland) he arrived at the same degree of common-sense virtues and realism as the great Fouquet, the father of French painting, as the brothers Lenain (1593–1677), as Philippe de Champaigne (1602–1674), as Chardin (who is one of the prophets of the French Revolution by the intensity of his still lives and interiors), as Gericault, and as Manet.

Vlaminck's colouring is pure, his drawing is spontaneous, his composition based on synthetical effect. There is a certain noise in his work as there is a certain noise everywhere in the world of to-day, even in old France. In the smallest of his canvasses, portraits, landscapes, or still lives you find an echo of the modern social drama.

For that reason, had he not always lived in the country of Balzac and Verlaine, he could have been a Russian or an American painter, as Russia does, but as Chicago, New York, or San Francisco do not yet, possess. He is farther away from what was, and newer in his subjects and in their execution, than any old or living painter of the United States: Whistler or Sargent or Harrison or William Dannat or Breckenridge or Samuel Halpert or Jerome Blum or