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3217 ALBERT MARQUET(Bordeaux 1875 - 1947 Paris)
Boulogne-sur-mer, le port. 1930.
Oil on canvas board.
Signed lower right: marquet.
33 x 40.8 cm.
The authenticity of the work has been
confirmed by Elizabeth Gorayeb and the
Wildenstein-Plattner Institute, New York,
23 October 2017.
Provenance:
- Druet, Paris, 14 October 1930, bought
directly from the artist.
- Ziegler, 26 November 1930, bought from
the above.
- Collection F. F. Uthemann, Geneva.
Exhibition: Geneva 1967, A. Marquet, Ga-
lerie du Théâtre, 3 November - 14 Decem-
ber 1967, no. 11 (with ill.).
Albert Marquet exhibited in the legendary
and art-historically groundbreaking "Cage
aux fauves", a room gathering the works of
young painters that scandalised the 1905
Salon d'Automne through the violence of
their colours. This is quite a paradox for
an amateur of grey, rainy atmospheres,
whose very modern cityscapes evoke a
seemingly banal atmosphere. Critics called
him a "non-roaring" Fauve or even "an
indoor cat". If Marquet did not make his
colours scream, the focus is all the more
on the drawing, which already vibrates in
two or three lines with him. He was ext-
remely upset by the debates and left no
theoretical text.
His simple style of painting, however, fas-
cinated photographers and film directors,
eventually earning him the deserved fame
as one of the most important painters of
the 20th century, alongside his lifelong
friend Matisse.
A number of painters had discovered the
harbour as a subject before Albert Mar-
quet, but he was perhaps the first to turn
it into a modern landscape. His harbours
seem alive; the sea is disturbed by the
port traffic and mixes with the ascending
smoke of the tugboats. Marquet's ports,
be they Marseille, Le Havre, Stockholm,
Algiers or Hamburg, convey his typical
palette of a light grisaille: leaden sky, dark
waters, white clouds, billowing smoke, and
hazy fog blurring the details.
Marquet painted the present work in
Boulogne-sur-mer in the summer of 1930.
CHF 50 000 / 70 000
(€ 44 640 / 62 500)