Curated by Cécile Debray

Between two bouts of military service in 1904 and 1914, André Derain—one of the original Fauves and certainly the best not named Matisse—executed three bodies of work that secured his place in the second tier of avant-garde painting. Daring color experiments in dialogue with Matisse (while both were staying in Collioure, France, in the summer of 1905) and a series painted in London the next year at the urging of dealer Ambroise Vollard were followed by a group of bathing pictures, which manage to almost hold their own despite the fact that they were begun the same year, 1907, as the first public exhibition of Picasso’s Demoiselles d’Avignon. Was Derain’s encounter with the legacy of Cézanne the kiss of death that subsequent criticism has made it out to be? Decide for yourself at the first exhibition in more than twenty years to exhaustively showcase what the show’s curator is calling Derain’s “radical decade.”  

— Paul Galvez