Derain, André - The Turning Road, L’Estaque (1906)

The World on Fire at L’Estaque

André Derain didn't care about how trees actually looked. In 1906, he sat down in L’Estaque and decided that reality was overrated. The Turning Road is a massive canvas, five feet tall and six feet wide. He wasn't painting a nice view for a living room wall. He was throwing a brick through the window of the art establishment.

When this hit the Salon d’Automne in Paris, people lost their minds. Critics saw these screaming reds and impossible blues and called the artists wild beasts. That is where Fauvism came from. It wasn't a compliment. It was a warning. Derain and his friends were finished with the muted tones of the previous century. They wanted something that felt like life actually feels when you are young and the sun is too bright.

Derain took the traditional landscape and stripped it of its depth. He ignored perspective. He replaced the soft gradients of the past with flat patches of color that feel like they might burn your retinas. The road winds through the scene, but it doesn't lead you to a comfortable horizon. It leads you into a synthetic world where the sun doesn't just shine. It shouts.

He painted on this scale because he wanted to pick a fight. Large canvases were usually for history paintings and kings. Derain used that space to prove that a patch of orange bark or a purple shadow was just as important as any emperor. He was done with the old world. He was busy building a new one out of pure, saturated light. It is loud and aggressive and beautiful. It reminds us that sometimes you have to break the world to see it clearly.

References

Derain, André. The Turning Road, L’Estaque. 1906. Oil on canvas. Museum of Fine Arts, Houston.

Freeman, Judi. The Fauve Landscape. New York: Abbeville Press, 1990.

Whitfield, Sarah. Fauvism. London: Thames and Hudson, 1991.

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