Rueil Near Paris

It was Maurice de Vlaminck’s vibrant Fauve paintings – executed in bright, non-naturalistic colours – that placed this self-taught artist at the forefront of the Paris avant-garde during the first decade of the twentieth century. About 1907, he attenuated his palette and, under the influence of Paul Cézanne, developed a more naturalistic yet multifaceted treatment of space, thus participating in the widespread shift from Fauvism’s expressive use of intense colour to Cubism’s geometric structuring. Unlike his contemporaries Henri Matisse and André Derain, in particular, Vlaminck generally sought his landscape subjects nearby, in Paris’ western suburbs. Here, from a rise and at a distance, the village of Rueil is seen through a screen of tree trunks spanning the foreground. The structural elements are defined throughout by black outlines, which, along with the successive planes of the buildings, lend the painting a solidity typical of Vlaminck’s conception of space during this period.