Maurice de Vlaminck. Rebell der Moderne

In the organizer's words:

The exhibition Maurice de Vlaminck. Rebel of Modernism is the first posthumous retrospective devoted to the Fauvist and influential artist of the French avant-garde in a German museum. On the basis of 73 selected exhibits, it provides an extensive overview of Vlaminck's entire painterly oeuvre: from his first compositions, executed at the beginning of the 20th century, to his experiments with Cubism inspired by Cézanne and Picasso, to his last landscape paintings, in which he developed a highly individual style of late Impressionism.

After his participation in the Paris Salon d'Automne in 1905, Maurice de Vlaminck became a leading representative of the French avant-garde. Like no other member of the Fauvists, he identified with the attribute of wildness and propagated the image of a modern artist rebel who had resolutely turned his back on the rules of the academies. His main source of inspiration was the work of Vincent van Gogh, whose intensely colorful works he had become acquainted with at a large-scale solo exhibition in Paris in 1901. Van Gogh's training as an autodidact and his maturing myth as an unrecognized artistic genius strengthened the identification that would also shape Vlaminck's later work.

In Germany, Vlaminck was celebrated early on as a pioneer of modernism. At the groundbreaking Cologne Sonderbund exhibition in 1912, he was represented more prominently than French colleagues such as Henri Matisse or André Derain with six works. As early as 1929, the Alfred Flechtheim Gallery dedicated an extensive solo exhibition to him in Düsseldorf. In the course of the National Socialist iconoclasm, his works were ostracized as "degenerate" in 1937 and paintings were forcibly confiscated from German museums.

The starting point for the exhibition in Potsdam is the Hasso Plattner Collection, which has nine works by Vlaminck, including four key works from his Fauvist heyday. The 50 international lenders include the Tate Modern in London, the Museo nacional Thyssen-Bornemisza in Madrid, the Centre Pompidou and the Musée d'Orsay in Paris as well as the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York, the Dallas Museum of Art and the National Gallery of Art in Washington, D.C.

An exhibition of the Museum Barberini, Potsdam, and the Von der Heydt-Museum, Wuppertal, where the exhibition will be on view from February 16 to May 18, 2025.