Maurice de Vlaminick

---

Maurice de Vlaminck (French, 1876-1958) is considered one of the principal artists in the Fauve movement, a group of modernist painters who from 1904 to 1908 united in their use of intense color. At the hight of the movement, Vlaminck said, "I wanted to burn down the École des Beaux-Arts with my cobalts and vermilions and I wanted to express my feelings with my brushes without troubling what painting was like before me." Nonetheless, his "revolution" was not self-generated. His painting was influenced by Van Gogh and, to a lesser extent Gauguin and Seurat.  Vlaminck participated in the controversial 1905 Salon d'Automne exhibition. After viewing the boldly colored canvases of Vlaminck, Henri Matisse, André Derain, Albert Marquet, Kees van Dongen, Charles Camoin, and Jean Puy, the art critic Louis Vauxcelles disparaged the painters as "fauves" (wild beasts), thus giving their movement the name by which it became known, Fauvism. Some of his works are available in our Art Gallery and we offer them here today.