André Derain - Waterloo Bridge

The French dealer and restless champion of post-modern art Ambroise Vollard suggested that Derain visit London in 1906 following Monet’s earlier and successful example at the turn of the century, and this painting is one of a series of Fauvist views of the city’s river and skyline produced as a result. It’s a particular favourite of mine, partly because it depicts London, and a specific part of it that I know well and so I feel a personal connection to it because of the sense of place it conjures for me, but mostly because of its exuberant and audacious use of colour. Aside from Pierre Bonnard perhaps, I can think of few artists that have (in the first half of the twentieth century at least) so joyfully and expressively luxuriated in colour to an almost visceral degree.

André Derain, Waterloo Bridge (1906), oil on canvas, Museo Nacional Thyssen-Bornemisza, Madrid

Colour is not used here to imitate nature, to reproduce an image from life naturalistically, but to say something about the artist’s solipsistic feelings for the place. In other words, I imagine that he didn’t particularly want to draw attention to the location but to his emotive method of painting it. His correspondence with Matisse at the time suggests that he wanted to attend to the primal nature of colour and mark-making as autonomous essentia separate from the idea of representation. More on the question of intent later.

The canvas is (mostly) covered by thousands of coloured brush marks but instead of these signs of facture being smoothed over and rendered seamless for maximum mimetic effect, as in a Raphael for instance, Derain makes them visible and leaves the canvas showing between them as evidence of his decision-making process. The graduated colour adjacencies are beautiful of course. The teal against the ultramarine on the river for instance, and notably the cadmium golds, ochres and pinks of the sunlight. Derain at first complained about the fog in London in his letters, and sometimes the lack of it, but notwithstanding any specific weather conditions that prevailed, here the diffusion of light is made to look like the most blessed cascade of phosphorescent particles as they irradiate the sky. It feels like the artist has uncovered a spiritual dimension to the eternal phenomena of light and colour, as it is particularised or atomised. This painting was made at a time when scientists were discovering more about the structure of fundamental particles (J.J. Thomson had coined the pretty prosaic ‘plum pudding’ term for his model of the atom’s structure as early as 1897), and although I wouldn’t claim that Derain was directly influenced by these specific developments in physics, he may have been more generally aware that what was previously considered to be the indivisibility of the elements had been called into question. Setting aside his revolutionary indulgence in colouration for its own sake, I think the painting evinces an ascientific acknowledgment of light as pure energy – a life force.

The so-called divisionism technique used here is similar to Seurat’s pointillism but bolder, with bigger marks and feels more excited – you might even say less prissy or formal. The application of paint remains deliberate but less restrained. Derain arranges his colour marks as if in a collage. The direction of each mark is important. In the sky, they spray fireworkingly out and down while on the river they jostle horizontally and suggest the continuous pulsing oscillation of water in flow. The view is from the Victoria embankment and shows the Houses of Parliament and Westminster Abbey towards the west as mere misty Wedgewood-coloured silhouettes on the right-hand horizon while the bridge itself and some of the smokestacks of the industrial buildings on the south bank are rendered in a darker cobalt lateral line that divides the canvas in two. This establishes separate domains: the vaporous aerosol haze of the sunburst above and the progressing flux of the river below. Importantly though, both domains are made from the same stuff: colour. States of matter, the physical forms of the world around us, gas, liquid and solid, are almost irrelevant when Derain privileges pigmentation above all other ways of evaluating what we can see or feel.

I find it difficult to think about Derain without recalling the later accusations levelled against him. Long after he had abandoned the Fauvist style used in this work, his art reverted to a more classicist manner which found favour with the Nazi regime during their occupation of France. He accepted an invitation from them in 1941 to visit an exhibition in Berlin, a move which was labelled as collaboration after the war. I suspect that this unwise decision was similar to that of P.G. Wodehouse who made some humorous broadcasts in the same year and from the same city, aimed at American audiences and which the Germans used for similar propaganda purposes. Perhaps both artist and writer were motivated by a feeling of wishing to do the minimum necessary to be left alone, so maybe more like grudging co-operation than full-on collaboration; perhaps they were too concerned about the consequences of refusing the invitations than the potential taint associated with their acceptance. What chumps they both seem in hindsight.

Derain’s call on this has been much debated, as has the wider question of whether an artist’s oeuvre can ever be judged without reference to their expressed views and actions or their intent. There can never be an absolute answer to this, but I lean more towards the view that art should be judged for its aesthetics, that once it is launched into the world its links to the person that made it are irrevocably loosened if never completely broken. This view is also supported by the Roland Barthes’ ‘death of the artist’ challenge to the idea of the creator as solitary god-like genius handing down their works from their masterly pedestals. Instead, the importance or relevance of the creator’s identity or biography is diminished, and the work is thereby liberated to be assessed as part of a broader cultural canvas. The role of the reader or viewer is correspondingly promoted; it is they who create ‘meaning’ in an artwork, not the maker.  So, I can still appreciate a Degas pastel even though he was a deplorable antisemite. Similarly, even though Dalí was a fascist sympathiser, Gaugin a paedophile, Eric Gill guilty of incest (and bestiality) and Caravaggio a murderer, their artworks as independent self-referential entities can still be enjoyed. The trouble is I suppose that you can’t unlearn troubling facts about creators’ histories, their motives and objectives and these can’t help but overshadow your regard for art and artist.

I digress…Derain was among the first of modernist artists to divorce the thing being represented, its form and its narrative, from the method of that representation. In one sense, the method, and what the method expressed, overtook the need for form, the end point of which stylistic development would be pure abstraction. Derain brings radical vibrancy to his view of Waterloo Bridge rather than taking some other quality from it. His Thames and the sky above it have an effulgence that is heartening and rousing. His artwork is made from dabs of pigment which dance to a life-affirming rhythm, and which have a quality of innocence (Derain was twenty-five at the time, a biographical point that is worth noting, pace Barthes) that feels playful and joyous at one level and challenging and provoking at another. Both qualities are stimulating and reward the viewer’s gaze to mesmeric effect.