“Allumettes et cigarettes”

Medium	Oil on panel
Signed	Signed lower right
Size	8.00" × 10.25" (20.3cm × 26.0cm)
Framed Size	14.00" × 16.25" (35.6cm × 41.3cm)
Dated	1935
Condition	Very good condition
Provenance	Galerie Denise Valtat - Paris c. 1940 Galeria Acquavella - Caracas , Venezuela - 1970 Private collection - Miami
Literature	This work is included in the catalogue raisonne the work of Louis Valtat - Volume 1, P.270 , Illustration number 2421

Summary

A still life of matchsticks and cigarettes might seem like modest subject matter. In the hands of Louis Valtat (1869–1952) it becomes something else entirely — an exercise in colour relationships of the most demanding kind, where the challenge is not grandeur but precision, and where the palette has to do everything. Valtat occupies a singular position in the history of French painting. He is described by art historians as the indispensable link between Monet and Matisse — a painter who absorbed the lessons of Impressionism, pushed through Pointillism, and arrived at a chromatic boldness that anticipated Fauvism by a decade before the movement had a name. When the famous Salon d'Automne of 1905 gave Fauvism its identity, Valtat was there — but he had been painting this way since the mid-1890s, working it out alone on the Mediterranean coast while recovering from tuberculosis. His friends during those years included Renoir, Signac and D'Espagnat. His dealer was Ambroise Vollard, who bought almost his entire output between 1900 and 1910. In a still life the colour cannot rely on landscape or atmosphere to carry it. Every relationship between tones has to be earned from the objects themselves — the warm buff of the matchstick box, the white of the cigarette paper, the shadows between them. Valtat's brushwork here has the confidence of a painter who has spent years understanding exactly what colour can do and how little it needs to achieve a great deal. He continued painting until glaucoma took his sight in 1948. He died in Paris in 1952, aged eighty-two.

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