Derain, André (1880-1954)
Portrait d’Alice Derain (Portrait of Alice Derain)
1920–1921
Oil on canvas, 91.5 x 73.5 cm
Musée National d’Art Moderne, Paris
Derain met Alice Géry, then married to the young mathematician and Bergson enthusiast Maurice Princet, in the autumn of 1907. Alice and her husband (from whom she soon separated to marry Derain) belonged to Picasso’s entourage, also close to Derain. A first portrait of Alice, painted at the time of the meeting, shows only her face in a violently simplified drawing, like a replica of the Portrait of Marguerite (winter 1906–1907, Paris, Musée Picasso), given by Matisse to Picasso, precisely in that same autumn of 1907. A second full-length portrait, of large dimensions, taken up again and finished in 1919, but probably undertaken before 1914, transforms Alice into a hieratic figure, a tall and thin effigy on a dark background, as if sculpted or engraved in wood (Alice with a White Shawl, 1919, London, Tate). The portrait of 1920–1921 (cat. rais., II, no. 835) is more like and more disturbing: it restores much more the personality of this strong, intelligent and cultivated woman, as much at ease with the painter friends of the “Derain gang” as in the circle of rich collectors and gallery owners (Walther Halvorsen, Paul Guillaume especially), who fought over her painting in the 1920s. Painted at a time when, in his own words, Derain “thought a lot about the masters” (letters to D.-H. Kahnweiler, end of September 1921), this canvas seems to summon both David and Ingres: by the learned modeling of the ochres and grays, by the simplicity and subtlety of the background treated in three degraded bands, by the broad and precise definition of the beautiful classical face with regular features, and of the folds of the loose clothing, in the latest fashion of the early 1920s. However, Despite the warm tones – red ochres, browns revived with pink, the coral note of the necklace – an impression of deliberate coldness, of deliberate distancing, emerges from this image that one might then be tempted to compare to certain more contemporary portraits, by De Chirico, Dix or Beckmann for example. Similarly, the voluptuous attraction exerted by the intelligence of the references to the past of the painting, and by the magnificent economy of pictorial means, is mixed with the ever-sensitive anxiety of the painter, grappling with the present and with the model who boldly confronts his gaze and that of the spectator. Isabelle Monod-Fontaine (Centre Pompidou)
See also:
• Derain, Alice (1884-1975)