Maurice de Vlaminck: Modern Art Rebel
The exhibition Maurice de Vlaminck: Modern Art Rebel is the first posthumous retrospective devoted to the Fauvist and influential artist of the French avant-garde in a German museum. With around 70 selected exhibits, it provides a broad overview of Vlaminck's entire painting oeuvre: from his first compositions executed at the beginning of the 20th century, through his experiments with Cubism inspired by Cézanne and Picasso, to his last landscape paintings, in which he developed a highly individual variety of Late Impressionism.
Hasso Plattner Collection / VG Bild-Kunst, Bonn 2024
Maurice de Vlaminck: The Bride at Chatou, 1906/07
After his participation in the Paris Salon d'Automne of 1905, Maurice de Vlaminck became a leading representative of the French avant-garde. More than any other member of the Fauvists, he identified with the attribute of wildness and propagated the image of a modern artist rebel who had resolutely turned his back on the rulebook of the academies. His central source of inspiration was the work of Vincent van Gogh, whose colour-intensive works he had become acquainted with at a large-scale solo exhibition in Paris in 1901. Van Gogh's self-taught training and his maturing myth as an unrecognised artistic genius strengthened the identification that would also shape Vlaminck's later work.
In Germany, Vlaminck was celebrated early on as a pioneer of modernism. At the groundbreaking exhibition of the Cologne Sonderbund in 1912, he was more prominently represented with six works than French colleagues such as Henri Matisse or André Derain. As early as 1929, the Alfred Flechtheim Gallery dedicated an extensive solo exhibition to him in Düsseldorf. In the course of the National Socialist iconoclasm, his works were banned as "degenerate" in 1937 and paintings were confiscated from the holdings of German museums.
Collection Hasso Plattner / VG-Bild Kunst, Bonn 2024
Maurice de Vlaminck: Banks of the Seine at Bougival, 1906
Hasso Plattner Collection / VG Bild-Kunst, Bonn 2024
Maurice de Vlaminck: The Fishermen, 1907
The starting point for the exhibition in Potsdam is the Hasso Plattner Collection, which has nine works by Vlaminck, including four key works from his Fauvist heyday. The approximately 40 international lenders include the Stedelijk Museum in Amsterdam, the Tate Modern in London, the Museo nacional Thyssen-Bornemisza in Madrid, the Centre Pompidou and the Musée d'Orsay in Paris, as well as the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York, the Dallas Museum of Art and the National Gallery of Art in Washington, D.C.
An exhibition of the Museum Barberini, Potsdam, and the Von der Heydt Museum, Wuppertal, where the exhibition will be on view from February 16, to May 18, 2025.
Cover image: Maurice de Vlaminck: Rueil, Boatshouse, 1906, © Hasso Plattner Collection / VG-Bild Kunst, Bonn 2024