de Vlaminck, Maurice - Restaurant de la Machine à Bougival (1905)

Squeezing the Life out of the Tube

Maurice de Vlaminck didn’t care about your rules. Nor did he care about the Louvre, nor the dusty men who lived inside its walls. In 1905, he walked into the Salon d'Automne and basically set the place on fire with a tube of paint. Restaurant de la Machine à Bougival is not a painting of a restaurant, it’s a scream in primary colors.

He took the paint and squeezed it right from the metal tube onto the canvas. There was no mixing and no polite blending. He had no academic patience. He wanted the visual equivalent of a bar fight. The impasto is so thick you can feel the desperation in the ridges of the oil. It is raw and messy and loud.

Critics called them Fauves. Beasts. They meant it as an insult but Vlaminck wore it like a badge of honor. He preferred the instinct of the street to the logic of the classroom. This was the peak of Fauvism. It was a movement that burned bright and fast because you cannot sustain that kind of heat for long without melting everything down.

The world in 1905 was changing and Vlaminck caught the electricity of it. He captured a moment where color was no longer a slave to the object. The trees and the buildings and the river are just excuses for the red and the blue to exist in their purest form. It was a revolution in a small frame and it changed everything that came after it.

References

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

Elderfield, John. The Fauves. New York: Museum of Modern Art, 1976.

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