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Updated: May 14, 2025
That humane beauty after which Derain strives is to be found, I said, in Raffael: it is to be found also in the Parthenon. I think this preliminary essay should close, as it began, on a note of humility and with an explanation. Twenty years ago, when I was an undergraduate, I remember reading just after it was published M. Camille Mauclair's little book on the Impressionists.
What is it Derain wants of them? I shall be satisfied, and a good deal surprised, if I can discover even what he wants of himself. A year or two ago it was the fashion to insist on Derain's descent from the Italian Primitives: I insisted with the rest. But as he matures his French blood asserts more and more its sovranty, and now completely dominates the other elements in his art.
Derain has a super-natural gift for making things: give him a tin kettle and in half a morning he will hammer you out a Summerian head; he has the fingers of a pianist, an aptitude that brings beauty to life with a turn of the wrist; in a word, that sensibility of touch which keeps an ordinary craftsman happy for a lifetime: and these things terrify him.
If so, in the name of Napoleon and Louis XIV, but, let us hope, with the science and restraint of Poussin and Ingres, they will turn, most likely, to the classical tradition and, while endeavouring to create significant form, will assert vehemently that they are expressing their political convictions. Sooner or later the critic who wishes to be taken seriously must say his word about Derain.
Picasso, Derain, Matisse, and Vlaminck began picking up such pieces as they could find in old curiosity and pawn shops; with Guillaume Apollinaire, literary apostle, following apostolically at their heels. Thus a demand was created which M. Paul Guillaume was there to meet and stimulate.
Not for nothing is Derain the most admired of Frenchmen by the young élite; for Derain is humorous without being gavroche, respects the tradition yet is subservient to no school, and believes that all the highest human faculties are not more than sufficient to the production of the smallest work of art.
In these early days Derain, considerably younger than Matisse and less precocious than Picasso, was less conspicuous than either; yet he always held a peculiar and eminent position, with an intellect apt for theoretical conundrums and sensibility to match that of any Fauve and his personal genius brooding over both.
So, if I am right, the extraordinary influence of Derain may be accounted for partly, at any rate, by the fact that he, above all living Frenchmen, has the art to mould, in the materials of his age, a vessel that might contain the grand classical tradition. What is more, it is he, if anyone, who has the strength to fill it.
English criticism is puzzled by Derain because very often it is confronted by things of his which seem dull and commonplace, to English critics. These are, in fact, the protests of Derain's genius against his talent, and whether they are good or not I cannot say.
And though Duncan Grant holds his own handsomely with Marchand, Vlaminck, Lhote, de Segonzac, Bracque and Modigliani, I am not yet prepared to class him with Matisse, Picasso, Derain, and Bonnard. Having bravely recognized this disagreeable truth, let us take as much interest in contemporary British painting as we can.
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