Conservative Beast

By the time he was 40. the late Andre Derain was one of the most successful painters in Paris; no one listing the four or five top names in the French art world in 1920 would have dared to omit his. But by the end of World War II, Derain's name usually came up only to be dismissed with a shrug. One of the original "wild beasts." he has been difficult to appraise; but at its best, his work has also been almost impossible not to like.

The proof of this could be seen last week at a tastefully selected Derain show in the Museum of Fine Arts of Houston. The show was the first big thing for James Johnson Sweeney since he was appointed director last January after angrily resigning from Manhattan's Guggenheim Museum. Sweeney stuck to Derain's pre-World War I output, but even with the span thus limited, one fact about Derain comes through. Only seemingly did Derain belong with his contemporaries; essentially he was a traditionalist. In the words of Jean Cassou. curator of the Museum of Modern Art in Paris, he was "the modern artist who refused to be modern."

Derain's father, a baker, was prosperous enough to want his son to have the most respectable of careers, preferably engineering. But Andre was already painting, and his best friend was the young ruffian Maurice Vlaminck, whom Papa Derain would not let into the house. Then one day an older painter by the name of Henri Matisse saw some of Andre's work, spoke so glowingly of his talents and prospects that Derain's father finally relented. Maurice and Andre rented a shack on an island in the Seine, and their careers finally began.

In the Houston show, Derain is at one moment a pointillist, painting with dots (see color), at other moments he is under the spell of Van Gogh or Cezanne. But in his whole work, the old masters are also present, for unlike Vlaminck, Derain spent hours copying in the Louvre. "I do not innovate," he explained. "I transmit." While his greatest contemporaries wanted to shed the past, Derain wanted to bring the Western tradition up to date. While Leonardo or an Ingres would paint a ball as round or oval, he said, Picasso or Leger would "turn it into a guitar, a bicycle wheel, a pre-Columbian monster. The handwriting has replaced style. It has devoured the ball."

Unhappily, he sold too well--and he knew too well what the public would buy. When he accepted an invitation to lecture in Germany during the Nazi occupation of France, his personal stature plummeted along with his stature as an artist. Cynical, bitter, and physically gross, he withdrew to his country mansion to pursue his favorite hobbies: speeding in his Bugatti sports car and gorging himself on food. His wife left him, and when he made headlines in 1954 after being hit by a car, many art lovers thought he was already dead. Two months later he was--one of the loneliest figures in the entire turbulent history of modern art.

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