Maurice de Vlaminck
Früchtestillleben, vor 1920

Alfred Flechtheim and Maurice de Vlaminck

The French painter, graphic artist and writer Maurice de Vlaminck is considered one of the co-founders of Fauvism together with André Derain. In 1900 he founded the Chatou Group. De Vlaminck took the same approach to art as van Gogh, applying paint thickly using bold, pure colours straight out of the tube onto the canvas. De Vlaminck turned almost exclusively to painting landscapes and still lifes. Later, influenced by Cézanne and Cubism, he attempted to create more balanced, structured compositions. As he became older, de Vlaminck used increasingly dark, gloomy colours, arranging shapes in a summary fashion. In 1933 he had two retrospectives at Bernheim-Jeune in Paris and in the Palais des Beaux Arts in Brussels. In 1937 one of de Vlaminck’s works was confiscated from the Folkwang Museum in Essen as part of the ‘Degenerate Art’ campaign.

De Vlaminck was represented by the gallery owner Daniel-Henry Kahnweiler with whom he had had an exclusivity agreement since 1907. De Vlaminck and Flechtheim met through Kahnweiler. Even before World War I Flechtheim had been buying contemporary art, especially from French avant-garde artists, and was in close contact with de Vlaminck.

Ever since the opening of the Galerie Flechtheim in 1913, Maurice de Vlaminck regularly took part in group exhibitions at Flechtheim’s galleries in Düsseldorf, Berlin and Frankfurt. He was represented by three oil paintings for instance at the exhibition ‘Auf dem Wege zur Kunst unserer Zeit. Vorkriegsbilder und Bildwerke vertreten’ that Flechtheim organised when he re-opened his gallery after World War I. A major solo exhibition was held in December 1929. De Vlaminck also contributed to Flechtheim’s magazine ‘Querschnitt’ as, for example, in the issue published in spring 1922.