“Chemin à travers les collines”

Medium	Oil on canvas
Signed	Signed & dated 1906 lower left
Size	18.00" × 15.00" (45.7cm × 38.1cm)
Framed Size	24.00" × 21.00" (61.0cm × 53.3cm)
Dated	1906
Condition	Very good condition - relined 1972
Provenance	A photo certificate of authenticity from the artist's wife and daughter accompanies the work Private collection France

Summary

1906 is the most important year in Othon Friesz's career, and one of the most important in the history of French painting. This was the year he travelled to Antwerp with Georges Braque — two young painters from Le Havre at the height of their Fauvist ambitions — and produced some of the most chromatically radical work of his life. A path through the hills painted in that same year carries the full charge of that moment. The colour in a Friesz of 1906 is not descriptive. It is expressive, pushed well beyond what the landscape itself would offer to a painter content to observe. The greens are too green, the shadows too blue, the warm passages of earth and stone too orange — and all of it absolutely right, because the point is not the hill but the sensation of the hill in strong light, the emotional temperature of a landscape absorbed at full intensity. This is what Fauvism meant in practice: colour as the primary vehicle of feeling rather than as a tool of representation. Friesz understood it completely and for a brief and brilliant period executed it with total conviction. Born in Le Havre in 1879 to a family of shipbuilders and sea captains, Friesz studied alongside Raoul Dufy before moving to Paris and joining the circle around Matisse. He exhibited at the landmark Salon d'Automne of 1905 that named and announced Fauvism to the world, and his paintings from 1905 to 1907 represent the movement at its most uncompromising. By 1908 he had consciously stepped back from pure colour, writing that "form reappeared in light and volume." A canvas of 1906 sits at the very peak of his Fauvist commitment — before the doubt arrived. His work is held in the Centre Pompidou in Paris, the Tate in London, the Museum of Modern Art in New York and the Hermitage in St Petersburg.

£23,950.00

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