Charles Camoin (1879-1965) Fruit bowl and flower vase

Oil on canvas, signed lower left
Dimensions: H. 65 x W. 54 cm (with frame : H. 91 x L. 80)

Born in Marseille in 1879, Charles Camoin is one of those essential painters who marked the shift from the 19th to the 20th century. He was very close to Matisse, Manguin and Marquet, whom he met in Gustave Moreau's studio at the Beaux-Arts in Paris. With them, he took part in the "Cage aux fauves" at the Salon d'Automne in 1905. This Fauve artist quickly achieved success, exhibiting regularly in Parisian and European salons. While Camoin's work favors the expression of color, it remains committed to the transcription of the motif and its luminous variations. In this respect, Charles Camoin is "the most impressionist of the Fauves", as Bernard Dorival wrote.

Camoin was also a messenger of Paul Cézanne's doctrine. Indeed, his encounter with the master from Aix left a deep impression on him, and he had the deepest admiration for him. The close ties he forged with Cézanne and the letters he received from him mark his main contribution to the art history of this period. From a personal point of view, this encounter determined for a long time the originality of Camoin's art, which tends to reconcile the spontaneity of the colored gesture with the order of the motif.

After the war, Camoin divided his life between his studio in Montmartre and Saint-Tropez, where he settled in 1921, increasingly affirming his taste for sensual, voluptuous and spontaneous painting, marked by the presence of Renoir, whom he visited in 1918. Throughout his life, he remained attached to his favorite themes: landscapes of the Midi, portraits of women, still lifes and nudes.

"As a colorist, I have always been and still am a wildcat on the loose." Charles Camoin.

This superb still life immerses us in Camoin's Modern art, which draws inspiration from the greatest post-impressionist painters. The composition is totally Cézanian, while the extremely pure drawing plunges us into the world of Matisse. In this emblematic work, the power of color is Charles Camoin's true signature, his pictorial language. As he himself said after the stricto sensu demise of Fauvism , Camoin has produced here a purely fauve painting.

Museums :
New York Metropolitan Museum of Art & Moma, Madrid Musée Thyssen-Bornemisza, Nice Musée des Beaux-Arts, Paris Musée national d'art moderne et Musée de Montmartre , ...