André Derain’s Arbres à Collioure has sold at Sotheby’s London for a record £16.3 million ($24 million). It doubled the previous record for the artist set at Sotheby’s in November last year, when Guy Bennet bought Barques Au Port de Collioure for $14.1 million. The sale also established the highest price ever paid for any Fauve painting.
Derain’s Fauvist works are more desirable than his rather more accomplished, if generic later paintings. Juicelings should check these out, and judge for themselves. I find it interesting that Matisse, who coached Derain extensively, sold an equivelant painting Odalisques Jouant aux Dames at the same Sotheby’s auction for £11.8 million. Matisse famously visited Derain’s doubtful parents, to persuade them their son should become a painter rather than an Engineer .
Arbres à Collioure is the kind of painting that has every art philistines blood boiling, ‘My twelve year old daughter could have done that,’ they will invariably moan. What a hundred years ago? Before color magazines, films, and television, when the world was still dominated by monoprint engravings, linocuts and black and white Victorians? I think it is about time you increased that child’s pocket money, about sixteen million should cover it.
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