The work I chose is Charing Cross Bridge, 1905-1906. This work is an oil on canvas by the French painter and sculptor, Andre Derain. He was one of the pioneers of revolutionary painting in the early twentieth Century. He used bold colors to depict concise painting boldly and was called “Fauvist” with Henry Mathis. Derain first discovered the art of black and realized the rich and imaginative of folk art; he studied the art creation of the ancient people, set foot on the way they walked and created the modern art by tradition.
His early works used segmented color blocks, fast curves, and dull colors. His techniques were not crude, the lines were elegant, and colors were harmonious. For instance, Charing Cross Bridge was his early works that used segmented color blocks. According to my understanding in the MoMA, Charing Cross Bridge was that he developed the bright Fauvist palette while painting alongside his elder peer Henri Matisse in Collioure, France in the summer of 1905. There they were imaginative and creative paintings.
However, when these works were exhibited in Paris, the public and critics found the palette startling and ridiculed their efforts. As Derain said, “Fauvism was our ordeal by fire… It was the era of photography. This may have influenced us, and played a part in our reaction against anything resembling a snapshot of life. No matter how far we moved away from things … it was never far enough. Colors became charges of dynamite.” I interpreted this sentence as even if the camera can record more realistic scenes, pictures cannot convey art. The picture is inflexible, and the art is souled. Here he assimilates a branch of oil paints to dynamite. Also, he once explained. “The great merit of this method was to free the picture from all imitative and conventional contact.”
The reason why this work attracts me is its brilliant color. In this picture, the author has rendered the sky a colorful scene, depicting the city and the meadows around the bridge in green and blue, which is different from what we have seen before. For me, although this work is called Charing Cross Bridge, my favorite is the coloring of the sky in this work, which makes me delightful and impresses me deeply. I have ever seen on the Internet that Monet also painted charing cross bridge series in 1899-1904. Monet is different from Derain. His charing cross bridge depicted the unique landscape formed by fog in London. I wonder why Derain used segmented color blocks to draw the sky.
LiYing, Thanks for sharing this beautiful painting. I’m glad that your comments address Derain’s use of color. The Fauvists are a good example of how Modernism is a rejection of Realism. The Fauvists are not trying to use color in a way that is “realistic” or like a photograph. On the contrary, they use color to convey mood and emotion and don’t feel at all bound by the colors of things as they really are. Does that make sense?