André Derain

André Derain was a French artist, best known as one of the spearheads of the Fauvism movement in the first decade of the 20th century. His Fauvist paintings were characterised by a bold vibrant palette — according to Derain, ‘colours became sticks of dynamite. They had to explode into light’.

Derain was born in 1880 in the town of Chatou, a few miles west of Paris. Initially, he studied engineering, but soon decided upon a career in art and began attending the Académie Carrière in the French capital.

Fauvism emerged in 1905, with Derain and his friend Henri Matisse its key figures. The pair were partly inspired by the recent innovations of Paul Gauguin, Vincent van Gogh and Paul Signac, and partly by the intense light and colours they encountered that summer on a trip to the Mediterranean town of Collioure.

The style entailed a spontaneous response to what was in front of them, expressed with fierce brushwork, simplified forms and bright non-naturalistic colours. Its name came from the reaction of the critic, Louis Vauxcelles, when he saw works by Derain, Matisse and other like-minded artists at the Salon d’Automne in October 1905. He labelled the gallery in which they showed a ‘cage aux fauves’ (a ‘wild beasts’ cage’).

Among Derain’s well-known pictures from this period are the blazingly-coloured landscape, The Turning Road, L'Estaque (today found in the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston); and a series of 30 paintings of London landmarks such as Waterloo Bridge and Charing Cross Bridge, which he produced on a trip to the British capital in 1906.

In the years running up to the outbreak of World War I, Derain moved on stylistically from Fauvism. He briefly explored Cubism and also made work under influences ranging from African sculpture to Gothic art. He was mobilised for service in the French army when the war began.

In 1919, he was asked by Sergei Diaghilev, director of the Ballets Russes, to design a production of Léonide Massine’s La Boutique Fantasque, the first of several ballets for which Derain would provide sets and costumes. With his paintings of the 1920s and 1930s, he produced nudes, still lifes, portraits that were classical in style and owed to a debt to various Old Masters. Derain died in 1954, aged 74.