Private Collection, France

The canvas is strip lined and has a relatively new stretcher. UV examination reveals a minor area of fluorescence to the right of the signature which appears intrinsic to the work and three small spots of retouching along the lower section of the right edge. A close inspection reveals a few intermittent remnants of glue along the turnover edges, not affecting the composition. The impasto is rich, colours vibrant, and this work is in overall very good condition. Colours: overall fairly accurate though brighter in the original.
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‘I wanted to burn down the Ecole des Beaux-Arts with my cobalts and vermilions'
Vlaminck, quoted in Charles Chassé, Les Fauves et leur temps, Lausanne-Paris, 1963

While landscapes may be the most common focus of Vlaminck’s Fauve œuvre, he nonetheless painted a small but significant group of still lifes between 1904 and 1908. It has been noted that ‘Vlaminck’s still lifes […]reflect the painter’s incessant questioning on the interpretation of space, the surface on which he tested his theories, furthered his research, mixed different influences and refined his inventiveness. They anticipated the perceptible evolution in his treatment of landscapes, notably at the moment he shifted towards a Cézannesque treatment of space and moved increasingly farther away from the violence of colours’ (Wildenstein Institute & Maïthé Vallès-Bled, Vlaminck. Catalogue critique des peintures et céramiques de la période fauve, Paris, 2008, p. 41).

Vase de fleurs is exemplary of Vlaminck’s pro𝄹found abil𝓰ity to deconstruct an image, translating the natural world into a dazzling array of pure pigments applied in broad brushstrokes. Such methods were typical of the Fauve artists, whose frenzied brushwork and distorted colours rocked the establishment of the Parisian art world at the time of their collective debut at the 1905 Salon d’Automne. This avant-garde group, which counted Vlaminck amongst its highest ranking members, alongside Henri Matisse and André Derain, created an intensely radical amalgam of the pure unmixed pigment used by pointillist Georges Seurat and the gestural expressive mark making of post-Impressionist Vincent van Gogh.

An expression of his youthful instincts, Vlaminck’s passion for colour was not unprecedented. In 1901 the artist visited the van Gogh retrospective at the Galerie Bernheim-Jeune, and he later recalled that this experience redefined his artistic path, going so far as to say he that he ‘loved van Gogh that day more than [his] own father’ (quoted in Judi Freeman, The Fauve Landscape, Los Angeles, 1990, pp. 14-15). Writing about the influence of van Gogh on Vlaminck’s art of this period, John Rewald commented: ‘In spite of all his admiration for all of van Gogh’s canvases, he immediately recognized in him a formidable adversary. Here was a man who had the same aspirations as himself, who had translated in his work the same torments and exaltations, the same visions and impressions with which he was struggling. And he had translated them with pure colours and brushstrokes, so expressive that all his emotions seemed to lay bare his canvases. Compared with the pursuit of delicate light effects characteristic of the Impressionists, whose pictures Vlaminck had seen occasionally in Paris, van Gogh suddenly burst forth with an unprecedented intensity of colour and design. Back in Chatou, Vlaminck began to assimilate van Gogh’s lesson’ (John Rewald, Modern Masters, Manet to Matisse, New York, 1975, p. 116).

Whilst admitting his debt to van Gogh, Vlaminck struck a uniquely revolutionary chord in his rhetoric of the period, writing ‘I wanted to burn down the Ecole des Beaux-Arts with my cobalts and vermilions. I wanted to express my feelings without troubling what painting was like before me […] Life and me, me and life - that’s all that matters’ (quoted in Charles Chassé, Les Fauves et leur temps, Lausanne-Paris, 1963). As Jean Leymarie writes, Vlaminck ‘went on pressing his colours from the tube straight on to the canvas - colours as pure and shrill as he could make them. After the unexpected windfall of April 1906, when Vollard bought up the contents of his studio en bloc and signed a contract with him, Vlaminck felt that he had arrived. His exuberance knew no bounds and the summer of 1906 was undoubtedly the happiest, most fruitful period of his whole career’ (Jean Leymarie, Fauvism, Lausanne, 1959, p. 94).