Verdilhan Louis Mathieu Provençal Painting View Of The Port Of Cassis Oil Canvas Signed Certificate

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.
19,68 x 28,74 in
Certificate of authenticity.
Louis Mathieu Verdilhan (1875-1928)
Verdilhan's powerful work makes him one of the most inspired representatives of the modern Provencal school. However, of the rich diversity of his pictorial career, the general public is mainly familiar with the period of masterful synthesis and chromatic and structural balance of the 1920s, when the painter, in full possession of his means, developed an astonishing plastic grammar.
Self-taught, Mathieu was a period artist with an isolated, personal temperament. He was full of praise for the old Provençal masters: Emile Loubon, Paul Guigou and Prosper Gresy, but was not influenced by them. As he strives to make his work modern, he expresses his admiration for mystical painters such as Le Gréco, 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 exhibition catalog: "Mosaiques mouvantes simulant des terrains aux végétations vivaces... Les couleurs crient ou râlent, la pâte se coagule en lourds caillots, se hérisse en stalactites rugueux". 1902 is a symbolic date, marked by the loss of his left eye.
He exhibited at the Salon des Artistes Indépendants in 1906 and at the Salon d'Automne in 1908. His canvases feature sumptuous chromatic symphonies, with a pronounced taste for twilight atmospheres.
It was in Allauch that he discovered Fauvism, and it was in Versailles that, at the request of Joachim Gasquet, he painted canvases in which he abandoned the illusionistic, diffuse space of the Impressionists to give rhythm to his composition with broad flat tints, affirming his preoccupations as a colorist and modernist. The curves and convulsions of his forms signal his allegiance to the Baroque movement, and give Fauvism a tonality of its own, with accents of the South, where abundant, warm matter and color control their fusion.
Alongside Auguste Chabaud, Pierre Girieud and Alfred Lombard, Mathieu Verdilhan helped Marseille join Paris and Munich in the great battle for modernity at the beginning of the 20th century. In Martigues and at collector Edouard Latil's, free of the Prussian blue of the Impressionists and the chrome yellow of the Fauves, he aligned the destructuring orthogonals of the Expressionists.
His encounters with knowledgeable, supportive personalities such as Joachim Gasquet, Albert Marquet and Antoine Bourdelle were decisive in shaping his career, the latter organizing his major exhibition at La Licorne in 1920. The palette brightened, shapes unfolded, broad and harmonious, and the sustained chromaticism of his solid colors was personalized by generous serifs.
His motifs take on a maritime Provence, his favorite subjects: the Old Port, taken from all angles, Toulon, Cassis, Martigues, and an inland Provence, such as the fields, parks, valleys of the Huveaune and Provencal villages.
In 1925, Mathieu decorated the Marseilles Opera House, and a year later became one of the few French painters to enjoy the prestige of a New York exhibition during his lifetime. By this time, he had achieved an astonishing expressive richness, a kind of supreme consecration marking the end and culmination of this "luminous" period. 1926 was a pivotal year, when the palette darkened: bright colors gave way to a brownish monochrome.
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