Date: 25-08-2002
Owning Institution: The Merzbacher Foundation
Publication:         Sunday Telegraph “In The Picture”  
Subject:       20th Century    

The last of the month’s summer pictures is a seascape by the French artist Andre Derain. Boats in the Port of Collioure, one of the most vibrantly colourful works of the painter’s early career, can currently seen at the Royal Academy in the exhibition “Masters of Colour: Masterpieces from the Merzbacher Collection”.

The origins of Derain’s incandescent picture can be traced to a postcard written to him by his friend, the slightly older painter Henri Matisse, in June 1905. Matisse was keen for Derain to join him in Collioure, a French village on the Mediterranean about 20 miles from the border with France. “A trip here is absolutely necessary for your work,” Matisse wrote. “You will find here the most advantageous conditions.” Derain promptly took up the invitation and arrived on 8 July. The two artists worked side by side throughout the rest of the summer, responding to the strong light and bright colours of the south, encouraging one another in their shared search for a new painting style to mirror the adventurous spirit of the new century.

Before becoming a landmark in the development of early modern painting, Collioure was a fishing village principally noted for its abundance of mussels. On arrival, Derain was instantly struck by the effect of the harsh, bright sunlight, which seemed to eradicate tonal contrasts and concentrate visual experience to a series of vivid accents of intense colour. He was fascinated by the orange and chrome yellow colours of the sun-scorched landscape, but “more than anything,” he wrote, “it is the light. The blonde, golden light which suppresses shadows… There is so much to do… everything I’ve done until now seems stupid.”

Painting in France was in a state of ferment at the start of the twentieth century. Late Impressionism, in the increasingly idiosyncratic hands of Monet, Renoir and Degas, was a powerful force to be reckoned with. But so too was the work of the Post-Impressionists, notably Cezanne, Gauguin and Van Gogh, who had taken the expressive use of bright and almost unmodulated colour to a new pitch of intensity. The “pointillist” and “divisionist” experiments of painters such as Georges Seurat and Paul Signac, with their dotted or dabbed mosaics of paint, based on complex theories about the visual effects of complementary colours, had introduced further complications.  A new generation of painters felt simultaneously challenged and baffled, as Matisse recalled. “The artist, encumbered with all the techniques of the past and present, asked himself ‘What do I want?’”

Derain’s Boats in the Port of Collioure boldly answers the question. Every element of the language of painting, each of those different inherited “techniques of the past and present”, has been taken to a blatantly expressive extreme – but above all, colour. Derain’s explosive use of colour is aggressively non-naturalistic. The beach in the foreground is a saturated red, the mountains in the distance bright pink, the sky made from swirls of agitated yellow shading inexplicably into a stippled expanse of green. The boats, sailors and fishermen are outlined in strokes of blue, or occasionally red, which has the effect of making each one stand out all the more sharply from its surroundings, like the memory of something seen under almost unbearably bright sunlight, almost burned into the canvas. The broken, sketchy handling of Impressionism and the pseudo-scientific dots and dabs of Seurat’s pointillism have been thickened and deliberately coarsened, almost to the point of parody, in the widely spaced green and blue brushstrokes which Derain has been used to delineate the expanse of sea. The white weave of the bare canvas shows through in many places. The cumulative effect of the whole is an absolute declaration of war on the idea that it is the primary goal of a painter to represent a scene. Art does not represent, but transform, Derain insists.

Yet for all its distortions of optical reality it does plainly strive to capture a kind of truth. Derain painted the sandy beach not as it looked but perhaps as it felt, scorching hot under his bare feet. He depicted the sky in rainbow colours, more suitable to the true radiance that he saw in it than a mere predictable blue could possibly conjure up. Even those bare patches of canvas, bold lacunae in the patchwork fabric of his sea, do more than merely emphasise the self-conscious artfulness of his art. They convey, with great succinctness and immediacy, the effect of blinding glitter coming off sunlit rippling water. Derain departed from the literal truth only to convey, all the more accurately, his own perceptions and feelings before the landscape which had affected him so strongly.

The pictures which Derain and Matisse created at Collioure in 1905 both shocked and excited those who first saw them, and were immediately recognised as a new phenomenon. The artists were instantly dubbed the “Fauves”, or wild beasts. Derain (unlike Matisse) soon retreated away from this bold expressive manner of painting, fearing that it was too remote from experience, too excessive in its emphasis on the artist’s own feelings. But the truth is that in his later years he never painted a picture that could hold a candle to the blazing brilliance of this one.