Blue vase with flowers
Vlaminck, Maurice de
París, 1876 - Eure-et-Loir, 1958
Blue vase with flowers, ca. 1906
Signed lower left: ''Vlaminck''.
Carmen Thyssen-Bornemisza Collection
Location: Thyssen-Bornemisza National Museum, Madrid
Oil on canvas
81,5 x 45,7 cm
CTB.1997.9
Artwork history
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Lock Galleries, New York
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M. Knoedler & Co., New York, 1959
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John y Frances Loeb Collection, New York, 1959
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Christie’s Auctions, New York, lot 125, May 12, 1997
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Carmen Thyssen-Bornemisza Collection
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-The Frances and John L. Loeb Collection. London, 1982, n. 18, lám.
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-Capolavori dalla Collezione di Carmen Thyssen-Bornemisza: 60º anniversario dell’apertura della Pinacotecca di Villa Favorita. Llorens Serra, Tomàs (ed.). [Exhib. Cat. Lugano, Villa Favorita]. Geneva-Milán, Skira, 1997, n. 102, p. 260. [Sheet by Ronald Pickvance]
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-Masterworks from the Carmen Thyssen-Bornemisza Collection, Tokio, Tokyo Metropolitan Art Museum; Takaoka, Takaoka Art Museum; Nagoya, Matsuzaka Art Museum; Sendai, Miyagi Museum of Art, 1998, n. 78, p. 174.
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-Do impresionismo ó fauvismo: A pintura do cambio de século en París. Colección Carmen Thyssen-Bornemisza, Santiago de Compostela, Centro Galego de Arte Contemporánea, 1999, n. 41, p. 124.
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-Del impresionismo a la vanguardia en la Colección Carmen Thyssen-Bornemisza, Barcelona, Centre Cultural Caixa Catalunya, 1999, p. 140.
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-Del post-impresionismo a las vanguardias. Pintura de comienzos del siglo XX en la Colección Carmen Thyssen-Bornemisza, Valencia, IVAM Centre Julio González, 2000, n. 20, p. 72.
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-La Révolte de la couleur. De l’impressionnisme aux Avant-gardes. Chefs-d’oeuvre de la Collection Carmen Thyssen-Bornemisza, Bruselas, Musée d’Ixelles, 2000, n. 29, p. 90.
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-Colección Carmen Thyssen-Bornemisza. Arnaldo, Javier (ed.). 2 vols. Madrid, Fundación Colección Thyssen-Bornemisza, 2004, vol. 2, p. 270, lám. p. 271 [ Sheet by Ronald Pickvance]
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-In the Presence of Things. Four Centuries of European Still-Life Painting. Part Two: 19th-20th Centuries (1840-1955) [Exhib. Cat.]. Cox, Neil. Lisboa, Calouste Gulbenkian Foundation, 2011, n. 33, p. 106, lám. p. 107 [Sheet by Peter Cherry]
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-Vlaminck, les années décisives (1900-1914), Saint-Tropez, Musée de L’Annonciade [Exhib. Cat.], 2013, p. 74, lám. p. 48.
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-La furia del color. Francisco Iturrino (1864-1924). Museo Carmen Thyssen Málaga.[Exhib. Cat., Exhibition Museo Carmen Thyssen, Málaga], 2018. Cat. 31, p. 116-117.
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-Colección Carmen Thyssen. Museo Nacional Thyssen-Bornemisza. Ed. Museo Nacional Thyssen-Bornemisza, Madrid, 2024. P. 286-287 [Sheet by Ronald Pickvance]
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– Maurice de Vlaminck. Modern Art Rebel. Museum Barberini, Potsdam [Exhib. Cat. Storm, A.; Zamani, D. Cur.], Ed. Prestel, Munich, 2024. Cat. 27, p. 103.
Expert report
Vlaminck’s Fauvist style found its greatest expression in the many landscapes he painted around Bougival and Chatou, often in the company of his friend and fellow-Fauve, André Derain (1880-1954). From 1904 to 1907, the height of the brief explosion of the Fauvist style, Vlaminck asserted: “I wanted to burn down the École des Beaux-Arts with my cobalts and vermilions and I wanted to express my feelings with my brushes without troubling what painting was like before me.” Nonetheless, his “revolution” was not self-generated: his painting was much influenced by Van Gogh and, to a lesser extent, by Gauguin and Seurat. Van Gogh was his essential mentor from 1904 to 1907, after which the “constructive” influence of Cézanne began to tame the Fauvist extravagances. Landscapes predominated in the Fauvist explosion. Nonetheless, portraits and still-lifes punctuated the Fauvist years at intervals. And the seemingly arbitrary brushstrokes, colouristic extremes and compositional elisions inevitably spilt over into Vlaminck’s still lifes. So it is with this painting of flowers in a blue vase. The identity of the flowers is subsumed in an equivalence of one-colour brushstrokes, a separate rhythmic pattern. Indeed, these brushstrokes, provocative and elided, deny any descriptive function as precise evokers of flowers: so much so, that it becomes extremely difficult to name any of the flowers. And the overall surface pattern is further emphasised by what appears to be the reflections below the blue vase of part of the flowers and the background, thus suggesting a glass surface rather than the expected wooden table-top. And all this despite the interrupted diagonal of the supporting surface.
The painting is generally dated to 1906, the highpoint of the Fauvist period.
Ronald Pickvance