WILDEST OF THE BEASTS

...All that mattered to him was that works of art be brought to the people, whether they were French or German...

...Indeed, Vlaminck shot the raw colors out of the tubes onto his canvas as though they were so many "dynamite cartridges," to use Derain's expression...

...Wildest of the Beasts By ALFRED WERNER ONE OF THE French giants who liberated painting from the yoke of tradition at the turn of the century is now celebrating his 80th birthday in full health and vigor on his Normandy farm...

...Even as a musician he was a Fauve, for when he and Matisse (who also played the fiddle) tried duets, the music soon ended in violence because Vlaminck insisted on playing fortissimo all the time...

...Bluish tones and blacks and whites predominate, but the turbulence, the drama of the Fauve artist is still there...

...Vlaminck, however, saw the answer to the strivings of his own heart in what for most students were crude, barbaric smearings...

...He explained his goal in one of his letters to his brother Theo: "Instead of seeking to reproduce exactly what I have before my eyes, I make use of colors in a more arbitrary manner in order to express myself forcefully...

...It has been said that every painting, regardless of theme, is likely to be a self-portrait if made by a sincere artist...

...Moreover, he misunderstood the political situation as much as he had failed to understand the artistic movements of the Twenties and Thirties...

...The cafe gossip found little about him as a private individual to warrant attention...

...Yet in the long run the cerebral restraint of Cezanne was as little fitted to the temperament of the unruly Vlaminck as was the rigid dogma of the Cubists with whom he flirted for a while...

...The rugged individualist Vlaminck, however, hated the art of the past: "I went to the museums as I went to the brothels—but I never went 'upstairs.' " Cutting himself off completely from the heritage of the past, he suffered from the lack of nourishment, inspiration, and opportunities to compare himself with and measure himself against the accomplishments of greater men...

...Curiously, Vlaminck, unlike the other Fauves, never completely calmed down...

...He was an ardent socialist, though it might be more appropriate to call him an anarchist...

...They worked together, shared models and mistresses, but eventually parted company because their attitudes to art were too diverse...

...the great Ingres decreed, and the vast majority of artists followed his lead...

...He was then and remains to...

...And some of Vlaminck's best work, thirty, forty, or fifty years old, is in the permanent collection of museums...

...This is true of Vlaminck, whose flower pieces and still lifes reveal him as much as his landscapes...

...As a young man, he formed a friendship with Andre" Derain...

...Anything that is well drawn is well enough painted...

...After the war there were tactless critics in Paris who used the ominous term "traitor" when his name came up in conversation...

...Such distinctions as Old Art and Modern Art, or Abstract Art and Representational Art, are far less important than the division between good and bad art...

...The controlled and disciplined Cezanne rejected him as a "madman...

...A white vase, filled with red poppfek antmonies, and other flowers,-v» dramatically arranged against a son£ ber background...

...Vlaminck exclaimed excitedly...

...The perversities of Montmartre and Montparnasse—peculiar love affairs, excesses of drunkenness, drug addiction, surrealist exhibitionism—these were all alien to this paysan who had fled from snobbish Paris to the solitude of the countryside, and whose only known vice was reckless operation of a racing car...

...What he lacked in skill—he was largely self-taught—he more than compensated for with a poetic instinct—wild, unbridled, clearly distinguishing his gunfire from the suaver, subtler work of the other Fauves...

...It is possible to decorate a whole room with Matisse's pictures, but Vlaminck's require a splendid isolation, much as does their man-hating master...

...To a visitor to his farm he once complained: "Because I have often repeated that I do not stupefy myself with theories, that the museum is as dangerous as the barracks, and that I want to remain a free man, there are respectable people who visualize me as a good fellow who shuts himself up in a trunk with a canvas and colors, and at the sound of the gong comes out again with a signed picture...

...It may be true that Henri Matisse, older, more refined, and perhaps a bit restrained by virtue of a solid academic training, was the first to find in the passionate outbursts of this burly giant a confirmation of his own aesthetic theories...

...Yet in the Dome and the Rotonde they could talk about his almost ridiculous productivity, his greed, his lack of sophistication, his general decline...

...Maurice Vlaminck, born in Paris a few years after the Franco-Prussian war, is a puzzling person...

...One Vlaminck (original or reproduction) is all the drama a room can hold...

...of Fauvism—the artist whose dariftg1 led to the birth of that group of radicals dubbed "Wild Beasts" (Fauves) by a reviewer who was baffled by the orgy of color assailing his eye at the Salon D'Automne group show of 1905...

...Nineteenth Century painting was a battlefield in which two factions were engaged in a life-and-death struggle...

...In inexpensive reproductions, it graces the homes of many who have never heard of the Fauves...

...He is Maurice Vlaminck, who might not have become a professional painter had it not been for an encounter with the genius of Van Gogh more than a decade after the death of that unhappy artist...

...Do they take me for an imbecile...

...As an overgrown schoolboy, somewhat neglected by his parents, both of whom i»cxe - practicing musicians, he was described in report cards as a bad pupil, irascible and impetuous...

...Werner edited the Little Art Book series and served as an editor of the Universal Jewish Encyclopedia...

...For the Impressionists colors were the bricks through which they tried to render the visual world with scientific exactitude...

...As a teen-ager, he became celebrated as a bicycle racer...

...If one looks in vain for the hu- ^ manity, the wisdom, the charm shown by men like Monet, Renoir, or Matisse in their old age, he should not make the mistake of judging the art of this master by the unattractive-ness of his mind...

...When he came out, there was excitement dancing all over his big face...

...Many French artists were not enchanted with Vlaminck's over-simplification...

...Vlaminck loved to pretend that he was just a man of the people, indistinguishable in dress or manner of speech from any laborer who might drop into a cafe for an aperitif...

...Vlaminck, whose works have been in great demand ever since the keen dealer, Ambroise Vollard, discovered the ex-cyclist and ex-musician, continued to paint "disturbing" landscapes even when fatigue and, finally, exhaustion had set in...

...He went not because he liked Nazism but largely because he enjoyed the attention and flattery, especially after having been pushed into the background by the advanced artists and critics of France...

...His great concern was not to imitate nature, nor even to make men see nature as he saw it, but to find an outlet for his sensations in color...

...Equally dangerous is the tendency to dismiss his work (or the work of Derain, Utrillo, or Se-gonzac) as old hat even though the Abstract Art of today is a truer mirror of the hopes, desires, and anxieties of Twentieth Century Man than the work of those whose development stopped in, say, 1920...

...A man of his temperament, who reacted like a madman to such innocent objects as boats, bridges, trees, and country homes, could hardly be expected to try to soothe...

...Like Derain, who also became a hermit and ended as a vindictive misanthrope, Vlaminck never tried to find out what was wrong with himself, or why he was so generally disliked...

...He served three years in the army, which he loathed, partly because he was a convinced pacifist and partly because he disliked any interference with his privacy...

...It is true that the Cezanne Memorial exhibition of 1907 had a sobering effect on him for a few years...

...The Vlaminck of the third and last period is the artist we recognize at a glance...

...Derain virtually lived in the Louvre, copying one mas-terwork after another, and eventually lost whatever originality he had by too great dependence upon styles and ideas derived from the Old Masters...

...Then came four years of enforced artistic inactivity, years of sweating and cursing, from which, after the Versailles Treaty, Vlaminck returned to his easel with a fury and vigor not usual in men well over forty...

...If we apply this yardstick alone, we can say that Vlaminck created a great deal of good art during his fifty-five year career, especially in the first half of it...

...But without Matisse, the brain, the theoretician, and the organizer, Fauvism would never have become the turning-point in the story of Western painting, the final break with the Renaissance tradition...

...A victim of his own virtuosity, he was now in possession of a formula that seemed to work miracles, and he could fool the public-—for a while at least...

...As a worker in a munitions factory during World War I he became so tired of the monotony of life that only the threat of being sent to the front forced him to hold his unruly tongue...

...For many years now, Vlaminck has been a manufacturer of melodramas, some tolerably good, some astonishingly bad, some possessed of a charm reminding you of the great old days of vigor...

...As a middle-aged and then an old man he could not recall the young hotspur who had scorned the idea of taking up painting as a career and who, dissatisfied with a day's work, scrubbed it off against the grass while it was still wet so that he could use the canvas the next morning...

...He bought a little African statute in a bistro for a few cents and took it to his friend Derain...

...But it was the more cerebral Picasso who grasped the importance of this find and made the bold distortions and exaggerations, the daring structural re-organization of nature that form the backbone of his own aesthetic philosophy...

...But it was Delacroix, regarded by Ingres as the Devil himself, who ushered in the new era of color...

...They showed it to Picasso whose verdict was, "More beautiful...

...Thereafter the Spaniard Goya had broken with the academicians whose unwritten code was: "Always line and never body...

...I no longer believe in anything...

...Was this clumsy wild man, Vlaminck, just a dolt with an instinct for color...

...Slashed on the canvas with a palette knife, his color, in his better works,-appears to have been thrown there by an act of the elements, and this apparent absence of "art" gives one the illusion of a devilish origin of the work...

...Van Gogh, however, endeavored to express through color "man's terrible passions," to depict the effect of sunshine, not on the objects of nature, but upon his own soul...

...He has been married twice and has five children, but he rarely refers to his family...

...His articles on modern art have appeared in a score of publications, including Commentary, The American Scholar, and The Saturday Review...

...Vlaminck, less intellectual, less inhibited, brutish, healthy, and undisciplined by nature, was to go beyond his idol, who was essentially timid and physically frail...

...As a result he exhausted his possibilities and, in the prime of life, became repetitious, aesthetically reactionary, and dull...

...But long before him the Englishman Hogarth had understood that there were no lines in nature, and that lights, shades, and colors were for a painter what counted...

...Vlaminck knew this, but he had turned seventy, was enormously rich, and he had been living far from Paris for a quarter of a century...

...And whether one likes or dislikes the man Vlaminck, one cannot help feeling a strangely sympathetic emotion upon learning that he is still around—he who was around when the battles for and against Captain Dreyfus were being fought, who sat in Montmartre bistros with the unhappy Modigliani, and who always hated soldiery and yet was one of the boldest soldiers in the struggle for a new, uninhibited, emotion-fraught art...

...Quite as beautiful," said Derain...

...Since all wars and all nationalisms were idiotic, why should he hesitate to travel to Berlin...

...Married at eighteen, and soon the father of two girls, he earned a living as an imitation gypsy in a restaurant band, then as a violinist in a theater orchestra...

...The gentle Pissarro had pitied Van Gogh...

...His coarse features and heavy body might have identified him as a peasant but he was in fact an amateur painter...

...All my confidence in civilization, in science, progress, socialism, all has been shattered...

...The half decade before World War I is sometimes called Vlaminck's Blue Period because of his switch from hot to cool colors, and sometimes L'Epoque Cezannienne because of the artist's attempt to emulate the later Master of Aix, with his architectonic order, his feeling for space and for depth...

...Vlaminck has often been called the real father ALFRED WERNER, Vienna-born art critic, has written and lectured widely in the United States and Europe...

...drama is conjured up by the denuded branches of a bare tree, spreading themselves before a stormy gray sky...

...He lingered in the gallery a long time...

...Vlaminck was probably the first Western artist to discover Negro art...

...Nearly as beautiful as the Venus of Milo, isn't it...

...His attackers were just "imbeciles," and as for Paris—what else had it become by now but "an immense flea market," where there was no genuine painting, where even the fleas were false, and where mechanical inventions, jazz, Negro art, and abstract art had ruined everything...

...He used pure yellows, vermilions, Veronese greens, and cobalt blues somewhat the way our own Abstract Expressionists of 1956 are using them, except that in Vlaminck's Fauve pictures the outlines of objects, painted in these dreamed-up colors, are still somewhat visible...

...Unfortunately, no fire in a human breast can burn eternally...

...For Van Gogh was, if not the only artist to re-discover color, certainly the most ardent advocate of its unrestrained use...

...If the gentle Matisse endeavored throughout his life to develop, as he put it, an art of balance, purity, and serenity devoid of troubling or depressing subject-matter—art which he compared to a good armchair in which one could rest from physical fatigue—Vlaminck, the egotist, had nothing of the kind in mind...

...To anyone who would listen, he solemnly declared, "I love Van Gogh better than my own father...

...Vlaminck felt a kinship to the anonymous Negro craftsman, some affinity to the "barbarian" and his exotic carving...

...He became the poet of bad weather, of stormy seas, dark, menacing skies, bare trees, slush and snow on deserted village streets...

...Battling Vlaminck" was a Fauve in politics, too...

...It was in March of 1901 that a young man, six feet tall, broad-shouldered, fair-haired, and blue-eyed, walked into the gallery of Bernheim Jeune, the most progressive art dealer of Paris...

...In the crude instinct which permitted him to paint Isle de Seine landscapes in the thickest impasto with the utmost disdain for local color, Vlaminck surpassed not only Matisse, but Braque, Derain, Dufy, Friez, Mar-quet, Rouault, and Van Dongen...

...Good art might be defined as art which fully and freshly expresses the wishes and intentions of its creator, who must be in full technical command of his media to achieve that goal...

...drama is created uj a scene by the juxtaposition of such harmless objects as a smoked herring on a white sheet of paper, a pewter, pitcher, and a large black urn...

...But an artist should be remembered by his good work alone...

...After the war he did not have to hold back: "If I had a son," he declared, "I would make this little speech to him: 'War has taught me an important lesson...

...During World War II he was one of the few French artists of note who accepted the Nazis' invitation to go to Germany to exhibit...

...day an anti-intellectual "intellectual...

...Curiously, this uncouth savage also fertilized the other great movement in modern art, Cubism, although he was as little concerned to understand it as to grasp Fauvism...

...I have confidence only in myself ...'*• Vlaminck has been a Fauve in his relations to family and friends...

...Van Gogh was enchanted by the remark of a critic after seeing one of Delacroix's paintings: "I did not know that one could be so terrifying with blue and green...

...Except for his friends Henri Matisse and Andre Derain, Vlaminck found few to share his enthusiasm...