Executed at the height of Fauvism, Bords de Seine à Chatou holds an important place in André Derain’s early career, as an emblem of both the brilliant planes of color that distinguished that moment, as well as the marked influence of Paul Cézanne on his artistic development. This bold landscape depicts Derain’s birthplace of Chatou and is executed with emotive lines and swathes of pigment, typifying the energy and dynamism which defined the spirit of the artist and his Fauvist colleagues Henri Matisse and Maurice de Vlaminck beginning around 1904. On loan from the collects ion of William S. Paley to The Museum of Modern Art, New York since 1990, the present work has been exhibited in some of the most prestigious museums worldwide including the Tate, the Musée de l’Orangerie, the Los Angeles County Museum of Art and the Baltimore Museum of Art, among many others. Acquired by Paley in 1956 and remaining in the same collects ion ever since, this is a rare and coveted example of Derain’s masterful early oeuvre.

Derain’s series of Fauve works, of which the present painting is a prime example, can be characterized by a departure from realistic representation and a desire to infuse the landscapes with a feeling of ideal and harmonious isolation. This Fauvist search for a modern-day Eden was certainly a reaction to the social and political unrest that was erupting throughout the world following the turn of the century. Here, Derain has abandoned the technical exactness of Neo-Impressionism in favor of an almost abstract mosaic of flat patches and short strokes of vibrant color, exemplifying the Fauvist mode of expression he had developed with Matisse at Collioure in 1905, which reached its full expression in works such as Matisse’s Open Window, Collioure and Derain’s Mountains at Collioure (both 1905, National Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C.) (see figs. 1-2).

As Derain remarked: “Fauvism was our ordeal by fire. No matter how far we moved away from things, in order to observe them and transpose them at our leisure, it was never far enough. Colors became charges of dynamite. They were expected to discharge light. It was a fine idea, in its freshness, that everything could be raised above the real. It was serious too. With our flat tones, we even preserved a concern for mass, giving for example to a spot of sand a heaviness it did not possess, in order to bring out the fluidity of the water, the lightness of the sky... The great.mes rit of this method was to free the picture from all imitative and conventional contact” (quoted in Denys Sutton, André Derain, London, 1959, pp. 20-21).

Derain’s approach to Fauvism, however, was unique and ever changing. Not content to continue painting exactly as he did in Collioure, there is an underlying formal structure to Bords de Seine à Chatou that hints towards the emergence of his later style. The trees are more solidly depicted and there is a sense of receding space that gives this painting a feeling of deliberate composition that is reminiscent of Cézanne. Derain would undoubtedly have been influenced by Cézanne's paintings, including those painted at l’Estaque seen at the retrospective exhibition held in 1904 at the Salon d’Automne, Paris (see fig. 3). The subject, composition, and brushwork of Bords de Seine à Chatou are all reminiscent of the mature work of Cézanne. As William Rubin notes in his discussion of this work:

The older master’s influence is also felt in the stylized, almost geoMetricas l forms that make up the flora of the foreground. These elements attest to this work’s profound modernity, as well as the increasing role Cézanne played in Derain’s artistic trajectory.

Unlike Derain's work at Collioure, in which the artist generally placed his vantage point high above his subject landscape, Bords de Seine à Chatou is laid out in the traditional manner of Impressionist views of the Seine, showing a horizontal segment of the river viewed from the ground. However, the large tree in the right side of the foreground brackets his composition, its remarkably long central branch and two smaller saplings segmenting the scene into geometric blocks. Each plane, viewed on its own, teeters on the edge of abstraction; it is only as a whole that it resolves once again into a landscape of Chatou, a quality it also shares with the late work of Cézanne. The emphatic horizontality of its format is unusual for Derain, and further underscores the interrogation of space and composition that characterizes Derain’s work from this period.

All Art © 2022 Estate of André Derain / 2022 Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York / ADAGP, Paris

At the turn of the century, Chatou was a small suburban town on the banks of the Seine just northwest of Paris popular with the Impressionists. Renoir had painted some of his best early work there (see fig. 4), and Derain would go on to depict the local landscape repeatedly throughout his career. He and Vlaminck spent their formative years in Chatou, where they shared an atelier in the beginning of the 1900s.

During the winter months of 1904-05, Derain and Vlaminck painted in the area surrounding the town, still a relatively rural and picturesque area that had been spared the widespread industrialization and growth which altered the landscapes of towns in the Seine valley to the north and west of Paris. Revealing the town’s importance in the development of Fauvism, Vlaminck later recalled, "A major part of my young adult years were spent along the Seine. My first attempts and scribbles date from Chatou. It was through them that I tried to render the emotion felt when looking at the river flow through the landscape of the Parisian suburbs" (the artist quoted in Exh. Cat., Centro Saint-Bénin, Aosta, Milan, Vlaminck: il pittore et la critica, 1988, p. 142).

Vlaminck also described the earliest days of the Fauve movement in 1904 when he and Derain often worked side-by-side in Chatou: "Each of us set up his easel, Derain facing Chatou, with the bridge and steeple in front of him, myself to one side, attracted by the poplars... I walked over to Derain holding my canvas against my legs so that he couldn't see it. I looked at his picture. Solid, skillful, powerful, already a Derain. 'What about yours?' he said. I spun my canvas around. Derain looked at it in silence for a minute, nodded his head, and declared, 'Very fine.' That was the starting point of all Fauvism" (the artist quoted in Exh. Cat., Los Angeles County Museum of Art, The Fauve Landscape, 1990, p. 15).

Derain and Vlaminck shared and exchanged ideas and pursued a similar stylistic course, and there was an important element of cross-pollination as both began to develop rapidly. Vlaminck used larger, wider brushstrokes and the absence of shadow in his work reflects Derain's influence (see fig. 5). Derain underscored this point in a letter of 1905 to Vlaminck from Collioure where Derain was working alongside Matisse: “A new conception of light consisting in this: the negation of shadows. Light, here, is very strong, shadows very bright. Every shadow is a whole world of claritys and luminosity which contrasts with sunlight: what are known as reflections” (ibid., p. 15). As a result, Derain’s works of this period, including Bords de Seine à Chatou, incorporate a use of color that is increasingly less naturalistic and more expressive. The abstract imperatives of painting began to override more representational approaches that had dominated the aesthetic of nineteenth century artists, and ultimately led to radical shifts in the canon of Modern art as defined today.