Old Master Paintings & Spanish Colonial Art
Lot 386:
Oil on canvas, measurements: 41 x 62 cm. André Derain (Chatou, June 10, 1880-Garches, September 8, 1954) was the son of a pastry chef, after finishing high school he abandoned his projected engineering career for painting. He began to paint in 1895 and in 1898-99 he enrolled the Camillo Academy and in his assiduous visits to the Louvre he met Matisse. Along with Maurice de Vlaminck, he belonged to the Chatou School and joined the Fauves group, creators of Fauvism. He was influenced by Cubism and Primitivism and was a great friend of Henri Matisse and Pablo Picasso with whom he experimented for a time in Montmartre. In 1916 the gallerist Paul Guillaume gave him his first individual exhibition in his gallery with a foreword by Guillaume Apollinaire and he illustrated Mont Piete by André Breton. He served in the First World War in the Vosges and stood out in Mainz until 1919. His fame grew when he won the Carnegie Prize in 1928 with exhibitions in London, Berlin, Frankfurt am Main and Düsseldorf in 1929 and in New York and Cincinnati in 1930-1931. The Nazis admired much his work and Foreign Minister Ribbentrop asks him to paint his family. Derain refuses but accepts an invitation to Berlin in 1941 that will be publicized by the German government and that after the Liberation will damage his image forever. will have to face the courts before serious charges of collaboration. In 1947 they discussed the settings for a ballet at London’s Covent Garden and at the Aix-en-Provence Festival: Mozart’s The Abduction from the Seraglio and Rossini’s The Barber of Seville, in 1947 and 1953 respectively. He illustrated editions of Rabelais’s Pantagruel in 1943, Oscar Wilde’s theatrical drama Salomé (1938) and Petronio’s Satyricon in 1934. This last series was never completed, and was published late. He returned to Chambourcy on very bad terms with his wife Alice; the painter had two children with models, and the couple ended up divorcing in the midst of bitter legal disputes. He died after being hit by a truck in Garches
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