Lot n° 5
Estimation :
800 - 1200
EUR
MAURICE DE VLAMINCK 1876-1958 - Lot 5
MAURICE DE VLAMINCK 1876-1958
"Letter on painting" by Maurice de Vlaminck, August 1914.
Document. 7 handwritten pages, rectos written only.
27.2 x 21.2 cm
Exceptional document by Maurice de Vlaminck in which he narrates in great detail his taste for painting and delivers a few life lessons. He begins by asserting the primacy of instinct over the School, and writes: "Going to museums bastardizes the personality just as going to the priest makes you lose your faith. Science kills instinct". He continues on this subject: "Sympathetic groups, schools, school heads, school masters; I don't accept these jokes (...) When you consider that it takes several people to get through a dangerous place, it's because you're afraid of being alone". He refers to Douanier Rousseau as an example of this primacy of instinct and his "magnificent stupidity". According to Vlaminck, the latter was "so candid" that he sometimes reached the "sensitive (...) of the primitive". He concludes: "You don't learn to be so stupidly brilliant, even in Rome". He then evokes Cézanne, the "sad friend", who "aimed so high (he only succeeded in) getting closer to life", then Renoir, whose "bad taste is so marked that he stops just in time not to be unpleasant".
After commenting on the work of his illustrious colleagues, Vlaminck speaks of his own painting in these terms: "If the creator has afflicted me with an unpleasant and irregular physique, I have no confidence in beauty salons to give me a Nero mask or a profile like that of Monsieur de Max. Such a man! Such a painting! I believe in that more than ever. He adds: "If one day I had to judge men, I would condemn them according to their works as painters, and I would not commit judicial errors." Finally, he refers to the First World War, which has just begun, and how, if he "couldn't stand human stupidity", it has turned into "one single monstrous thing: war!". He adds, "All my confidence in civilization, science, progress, socialism, it's all collapsed! I don't believe in anything anymore, I only trust myself". He concludes this text by asserting that painting "doesn't make progress", and gives a piece of advice to men in general, and then to painters: "If you want to be a man, to live, not to die before you've lived, get away from ready-made ideas, chewed-up food and rewards... If you're a painter, just look inside yourself for what you like. When you're not sterile, you don't adopt other people's children."
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