André Derain

Known as an important modern artist and leading member of the Fauve group, André Derain was also a prodigious collector. By the time of his death in 1954, he had assembled a remarkable collection that spanned several areas of focus: in addition to modern paintings—primarily Impressionist, Fauvist, and Cubist compositions acquired directly from his artist friends and leading Parisian dealers who also represented him—Derain collected paintings by old masters, works on paper, decorative bronzes, and objects from equatorial Africa and Oceania.

Raised outside of Paris, Derain began his formal artistic training at the Académie Camillo, where he studied painting under Symbolist artist Eugène Carrière from 1898 to 1901; he also formed a close friendship with the self-taught artist Maurice de Vlaminck, with whom he shared a studio in Chatou in 1904. In 1900, he met Henri Matisse, who championed the young artist’s work and introduced him to gallerists and dealers in Paris in the following years, including the dealer Ambroise Vollard, who purchased the entire contents of Derain’s studio. In 1907, Derain signed a contract with the dealer Daniel-Henry Kahnweiler, who remained a tireless advocate of the artist’s work until 1922. In 1923, he entered into an exclusive agreement with the gallerist Paul Guillaume. His representation by three preeminent dealers—Vollard, Kahnweiler, and Guillaume—provided the artist with the financial stability to work freely across several media and to assemble the diverse collection of modern paintings, sculpture, and ethnographic objects that filled his Paris studios at 13 rue Bonaparte (1910–27) and a large home and adjoining studio designed by the Polish architect Marcel Zielenski at 5 rue Georges Braque (1929–35).

Derain collaborated with prominent avant-garde figures on several publications and theatre designs, creating illustrations for Guillaume Apollinaire (L’Enchanteur pourrissant,1909), Max Jacob (Poèmes, 1912), and André Breton (Monte de Piété, 1919). Between 1918 and 1951, Derain designed sets and costumes for no fewer than twenty stage productions, including six productions for the Ballets Russes under Sergei Diaghilev and George Balanchine in Paris, London, and New York. In 1932, he collaborated with filmmaker Jean Renoir, writing the screenplay for N’Bongo (1932).

Derain was a prodigious collector, acquiring more than four hundred paintings by his contemporaries including Vlaminck (Portrait of André Derain, 1906, The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York). Like his Fauve contemporaries, Matisse and Vlaminck, Derain also began to collect objects from Africa and Oceania, having encountered them in the personal collection of Guillaume Apollinaire, at the Musée d’Ethnographie du Trocadéro in Paris and at the British Museum in London. Many of these objects are visible in photographs of his studio taken in 1912, including a Fang mask that he purchased from Vlaminck in 1907 and a Fang reliquary figure (Seated Female,Gabon,19th–early 20th century, The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York) that he sold to the artist Jacob Epstein in 1913. After the First World War, Derain’s stylistic turn to classical sources led him to devote much of his attention as a collector to Dutch genre paintings and early nineteenth-century French paintings, and he acquired the work of Jean-Baptiste-Camille Corot, Gustave Courbet, Jean-Auguste-Dominique Ingres, and Rembrandt van Rijn. He also collected ceramics, bronzes, and a wide array of decorative arts.

In 1935, after purchasing a country home in Chambourcy, he continued to paint and exhibit intermittently, but distanced himself from the artistic scene in Paris. Following his death in a car accident in 1954, his collection was exhibited in a major retrospective at the Galerie Charpentier and sold in two landmark sales at the Hôtel Drouot in 1955.