DERAIN, André (Chatou, 1880 – Garches, 1954)
Born in Chatou, near Paris, Derain received his first painting lessons in 1895, from Father Jacomin. In 1898 he joined the Académie Camillo, in Paris, where he coincided with Henri Matisse. Two years later he shared an atelier with Maurice de Vlaminck in the Île de Chatou.
After finishing his military service in 1904, Derain returned to Chatou to paint with Vlaminck. Encouraged by Matisse, he presented several of his works at the Salon des Indépendants in 1905. That summer, he worked with Matisse in Colliure and in the autumn he featured in the controversial cage aux fauves at the Salon d’Automne alongside Matisse, Vlaminck, Marquet, Rouault, Friesz, Van Dongen, Camoin and Puy. In 1906 he went to London at the suggestion of Ambroise Vollard, the art merchant who had just acquired most of his works. He also visited L’Estaque, Cassis and Martigues, and that year he produced paintings characterised by saturated colours and a careful use of light. On his return to Paris he frequented the Musée d’Ethnographie at the Trocadéro, and encouraged Picasso to follow in his footsteps. In 1907, he undertook his first sculptures. That year he contemplated Les Demoiselles d’Avignon in Picasso’s workshop and visited Cézanne’s retrospective exhibition at the Salon d’Automne. In the winter of 1907–1908 he went through a period of crisis in which he destroyed a substantial part of his works. In the following years, his interest for Cézanne’s painting, as well as his increasing contacts with Picasso, brought about a change in his art, towards a greater chromatic restriction and the use of more constructive shapes. At the same time, formal and iconographic features that brought him closer to the “classical” world made their first appearance in his works.
After the First World War he worked on stage designs for Serge Diaghilev’s Russian ballets, as well as illustrations for several books and magazines. Increasingly at the margin of the day’s fashion, Derain returned to more traditional genres such as nudes, landscapes and still lifes, in an attempt to reconcile modern art with the examples of great masters of the past, from the Venetian painters to artists like Poussin, Corot, Courbet, Cézanne or Renoir.
In 1928 Derain received the Carnegie Prize and in 1935 the Kunsthalle of Basel organised his first great retrospective. Derain continued painting until the 1950s, increasingly isolated in his home in Chambourcy, near Saint-Germain-in-Laye. He was run over by a car and died in Garches, on 2 September 1954.
Juan Á. López-Manzanares
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