André Derain

The French painter and sculptor André Derain belongs to the Cubists and Fauves with whom he exhibited in the Salon des Indépendants in Paris. From 1901 he shared a studio with an artist friend, Maurice de Vlaminck, in Paris where he also regularly discussed ideas with the Cubist artists George Braque and Pablo Picasso. Towards the end of the 1920s he was attracted by the policies of the National Socialists. When the German ‘Propagandastaffel’ – the propaganda squadron – invited French artists to visit the studios of their German colleagues in 1941, organised by the Reich Ministry of Public Enlightenment and Propaganda, Derain was among them. Other major artists included Vlaminck, Othon Friesz, Cornelis Van Dingen, Charles Despiau and Paul Belmondo. Subsequently the New York magazine ‘Time’ put Derain on the blacklist of ‘collabos’ who had to reckon on being sentenced after the war. Daniel-Henry Kahnweiler (1884–1979), who was based in Paris and with whose gallery Derain had signed an exclusivity agreement in 1907, was deeply disappointed. In 1920 Kahnweiler dedicated an art-theoretical treatise to him under the pseudonym Daniel Henry. It deals with the artist’s genius with Cubist subjects and places Derain in the tradition of the avant-garde artist Paul Cézanne. His Fauvist period on the other hand shows the influence of Henri Matisse.

André Derain’s international fame is largely attributable to Daniel-Henry Kahnweiler. Immediately after entering a cooperation agreement in 1921 with Alfred Flechtheim, the latter stated what he needed for the opening of his new branch gallery in Berlin at Kahnweiler’s: “What we must have: one or two very important pictures by Derain; several very good works by your other artists and a few of your early Picasso drawings.” Flechtheim in fact exhibited three works by Derain at the opening exhibition in October 1921. Derain’s solo exhibition in Flechtheim’s gallery in Berlin in April 1929 included numerous watercolours and drawings in addition to 69 oil paintings. In his foreword, Flechtheim thanked his “friend Mr. Henry Kahnweiler of Paris” for helping to make the exhibition actually happen. Derain was an important artist in Flechtheim’s gallery, being a major participant at at least fifteen group exhibitions between 1913 and 1930.