"I have found a boat, small with two sails, that would make me happy. Unfortunately, I need one hundred francs.. ..and I havent got it! If you want, I could give you two canvases which you could sell, just to make you some many and you could give me the hundred francs.. .Kahnweiler [Paris art-dealer] is the only one who gives me money, and just what we need to live on."
André Derain was a French artist, painter, sculptor and co-founder, with Henri Matisse, of Fauvism. His paintings of 1905–1906 are characterized by riotous colourism in the Fauve style. By 1910, however, his work had become more austere as a result of his study of Cézanne and the old masters. After the First World War, Derain became one of the leaders of the new classicism in the arts known as the
"[K]nowing both [ Picasso and Derain], I feel personally (though I should like to express it as tentatively and hesitatingly as possible) that Derain, by pushing along the road which Picasso pointed down only to turn aside, has arrived at a weightier, more moving conception of pictorial expression."
"There is only one kind of painting: landscape. It is the most difficult. It has also, I believe, the most simple kind of composition. Because no one can stop us from imagining the world in the way that pleases us most."
"What, after all, is a pretty woman? Its a mere subjective impression – what you yourself think of her. Thats what I paint, another kind of beauty of my own."
"If I paint a girl in the sunlight, its the sunlight I am painting, not the real girl; and even for that I should have the sunlight on my palette. I dont care for an accidental effect of light and shade, a thing of mere charm."
"There is often more psychic appeal in a so-called ugly woman than there is in a pretty one; and, in my ideal, I reconstruct her to bring that beauty forth in terms of line or volume."
"The Japanese see things that way. They dont paint sunlight, they dont cast shadows that perplex one and falsify the true shape of things. The Egyptian figures have simplicity, dignity, directness, unity; they express motion almost as if by a conventional formula, like writing itself, so direct it is. So I seek a logical method of rendering my idea."