VERDILHAN Louis Mathieu Provençal painting View of the port of Cassis Oil on canvas signed Certificate.

Louis Mathieu Verdilhan (1875-1928)

View of the port of Cassis.

Oil on canvas signed lower left.

50x73 cm

Certificate of authenticity.

Louis Mathieu Verdilhan (1875-1928)

Verdilhan's powerful work makes him one of the most inspired representatives of the modern Provençal school. However, from the rich diversity of pictorial careers, the general public mainly knows the period of masterful syntheses, of the chromatic and structural balance of the 1920s, when the painter in full possession of his means developed a surprising plastic grammar.

Self-taught, Mathieu is an artist of periods, with an isolated and personal temperament. He is full of praise for the old masters of Provence: Emile Loubon, Paul Guigou or Prosper Gresy, without being influenced by them. Striving to make his work modern, he expresses his admiration for mystical painters such as Le Greco, Zurbaran and Van Gogh.

Paris and Provence are at the origin of his creation, like a bipolarity that continues throughout his career. His first major personal and public exhibitions took place in 1902 at the Galerie Braun, then in 1905 at the Palais des Architectes, in Marseille, for which Léonce Guerre wrote in his preface to the catalog of the exhibition: "Moving mosaics simulating land with vegetation perennials… The colors scream or grumble, the dough coagulates in heavy clots, bristles in rough stalactites”. 1902 is a symbolic date which marks his itinerary with the loss of his left eye.

He participated in the Salon des Artistes Indépendants in 1906 and in 1908 at the Salon d'Automne. He creates canvases where sumptuous chromatic symphonies develop, with a pronounced taste for twilight atmospheres.

It was in Allauch that he discovered Fauvism and it was in Versailles that he painted, at the request of Joachim Gasquet, canvases in which he abandoned the illusionist and diffuse space of the Impressionists to punctuate his composition with large flat areas. , affirming his concerns as a colorist and a modernist. The shapes curve, bend, convulse and signal its belonging to the Baroque movement and give Fauvism a tone specific to the accents of the South where abundant and warm material and color control their fusion.

With Auguste Chabaud, Pierre Girieud or Alfred Lombard, Mathieu Verdilhan allows Marseille to be placed alongside Paris and Munich in the great battle for modernity at the start of the XNUMXth century. In Martigues and with the collector Edouard Latil, freed from the Prussian blue of the Impressionists, the chrome yellow of the Fauves, he aligns the destructuring orthogonals of the Expressionists.

His encounters with well-informed personalities willing to support him such as Joachim Gasquet, Albert Marquet and Antoine Bourdelle were decisive in the development of his career, the latter organizing his great exhibition of La Licorne in 1920. The palette became brighter, the forms unfold, wide and harmonious, and the sustained chromaticism of its flat areas is personalized by generous serifs.

His motifs take up a marine Provence, his favorite subjects: the Old Port, taken from all sides, Toulon, Cassis, Martigues, and an interior Provence, such as fields, parks, the valleys of Huveaune and villages. Provencal.

In 1925, Mathieu decorated the Opéra de Marseille and a year later he became one of the rare French painters to have benefited, during his lifetime, from the prestige of a New York exhibition. At that time, he reached an astonishing expressive richness, like a sort of supreme consecration marking the end and the culmination of this "luminous" period. 1926 was the pivotal year when the palette darkened: bright colors gave way to brownish shades.

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