Anachronisms in Paris

Maurice de Vlaminck used to be one of the "wild beasts" (fauves) who in 1905 led the vanguard of modern French art. Nowadays, he enjoys bellowing about the hollowness of it all. Paris painting circles last week were chewing over the latest Vlaminck roars, published in the Paris weekly, Arts. Excerpts: P: "The capital of France has become an immense flea market. To the connoisseur hoping to find a truly French painting . . . everything new turns out to be old and refurbished . . . Even the fleas are false." P: "Mechanical invention reigns in the studios of Montmartre and Montparnasse. Mankind is consumed in making gas explode in cylinders, in making engines turn faster and faster . . . Genuine inspiration is stifled before it can bear fruit." P: Negro sculpture, Negro art, jazz, syncopated rhythm, contorted forms, flattened shapes--all this has become a slogan . . . The so-called renaissance of modern art is nothing more than a bastard arrangement of Negro art. In order to recover their youth, the elite of our civilization, who no longer have anything to say . . . have grasped greedily at the art of these alleged savages." P: "Abstract painters have betrayed painting and, after killing it, have shut it up in a cubist coffin. Life today hardly allows one to be a painter. Tomorrow it will be even less so. What is painting today? An anachronism."

In the midst of all this, Vlaminck last week put 30 of his own latest anachronisms on display in a Paris gallery. They were the same windswept villages and groves, glowering beneath cloudy skies, that he has been painting for the past 35 years. One modern note: beside one of the rutted country roads that Vlaminck loves to paint, the artist had highlighted the shining red pumps and the oval sign of an Esso station.

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