André Derain was born in 1880 in Chatou, just outside Paris. By 1895 he studied painting on his own. In 1898 he studied to be an engineer but meanwhile he attended painting classes under Eugène Carrière and also met Henri Mattisse. In 1900 he met Maurice de Vlaminck and shared a painting studio with him. It was interrupted by military service from 1901 to 1904. It was Matisse who persuaded his parents to drop his engineering career to become a full-time painter. So Derain attended the Académie Julian to learn painting.
 |
| Monument (1905) |
 |
| Mountaints at Collioure (1905) |
Derain and Matisse worked together through the summer of 1905 in the Mediterranean village of Collioure and Derain completed the "Mountains at Collioure" painting. The vivid, unnatural colors led the critic Louis Vauxcelles to talk about their works as les Fauves, or "the wild beasts". That was the start of the Fauvist movement. In March 1906 the art dealer Ambroise Vollard sent Derain to London to produce a series of paintings with the city as subject. He painted for example the Tower Bridge and the Thames. This would become his most famous work. He used the technique of Pointillism of multiple dots like Van Gogh.
 |
| Big Ben (1906) |
 |
The Pool of London (1906)
|
 |
| L'Église de Carrières-sur-Seine (1909) |
 |
Woman and Mountain (1907-1908)
|
At Montmartre in Paris he moved from Fauvism to a style influenced by Cubism and Paul Cézanne. In 1914 he was mobilized for military service in World War I and until his release in 1919 he would have little time for painting, although in 1916 he provided a set of illustrations for André Breton's first book, Mont de Piete. Derain won new acclaim as a leader of the renewed classicism. In 1919 he designed the ballet La Boutique fantasque for Diaghilev, leader of the Ballets Russes. This led to the creation of more ballet designs. Then Derain was awarded the Carnegie Prize in 1928 for his "Still-life with Dead Game". From then on his works were on display at international exhibitions in London, Berlin, Frankfurt, Düsseldorf, New York City and Cincinnati, Ohio.
 |
| Dancer (1910) |
 |
| Still-life with Dead Game (1928) |
 |
| Vue de Donnemarie-en-Montois (1942) |
During the German occupation in World War II he works were on display in Berlin and was used as Nazi propaganda. Therefore after the Liberation he was branded a collaborator. In 1953 he contracted an eye infection from which he never fully recovered. He died in Garches, Hauts-de-Seine, Île-de-France, France in 1954 when he was struck by a moving vehicle.
