Still Life with Apples (Nature Morte aux Pommes)

Description

March 28, 2009
Maurice de Vlaminck—a painter, printmaker, draftsman, writer, and musician—is thought to have had no formal training as an artist. He made his living as a bicycle mechanic, a café violinist, and a writer for anarchist newspapers. Vlaminck reveled in his rough-and-tumble roots and his undisciplined lifestyle, and he often ridiculed the pretensions of high culture; he claimed, for example, that he had never visited the Louvre and even demanded that Europe’s most prestigious fine arts academies be burned down. Still Life with Apples, however, contradicts this self-fashioned image of the artist-as-rebel. Here Vlaminck demonstrates himself to be familiar with and accomplished in the leading stylistic developments of early twentieth-century avant-garde painting. The application of paint in little blocks of color and the rendering of objects, which seem to bleed into the surrounding environment as a consequence of open passages, are especially reminiscent of the work of Post-Impressionist painter Paul Cézanne, whom Vlaminck greatly admired.