A retrospective of the work of Albert Marquet (1875-1947) shown this spring at Lausanne's Fondation de l'Hermitage highlights the singular independence of a painter who, despite an early flirtation with the Fauves and a lifelong friendship with Matisse, Picasso, and Bonnard, resolutely went his own way. He avoided any label, joined no movement, accepted no honors. Today, Neorealists in New York and Tokyo are well aware of the influence of a twentieth-century artist who painted only what he saw.
Marcelle Marquet, his widow, describes the artist as having been a shy, quiet man who was never bored for a minute. Behind his thick round glasses, Marquet never tired of looking at life around him.
This fascination began even as a child in Bordeaux, where he was born. Poor sight and a limp kept him from enjoying school or games. The myopic, lonely boy spent every spare moment by a river filled with ships and tugs, unconsciously recording the play of light and water. His mother would recollect that before he could even walk, he liked to scribble on the sidewalk with bits of charcoal. No amount of scolding could deter him, and later he marked up his schoolbooks quite as impenitently.
Admirably Determined Mother
When Marquet decided he wanted to study painting, his admirably determined mother did not hesitate to sell a bit of land and open a shop in Paris where she sold enough buttons and dressmaker's supplies to keep the family in frugal meals and provide Marquet with paints, canvases, and brushes. His father, a railway employee, joined them many years later.
At the Ecole des Arts Décoratifs, then at the Beaux Arts, Marquet met and worked beside Matisse, a slightly older, more experienced student. He would spend hours at the Louvre copying Chardin, Claude Lorrain, or Corot, or suddenly sally out with his friends "to see what's going on" or to sketch passersby along the Paris boulevards. This increased not only his powers of observation but the speed of his sketches. In class he was an indifferent student, later observing that the only good things about art school were that it offered "a heated studio and free models to impoverished students." Living a hand-to-mouth existence, the young artists shred long working hours and endless discussions in bohemian hangouts like the Café Procope.
Although Marquet's early paintings, with their pale tones and muted colors, showed the influence of the Dutch masters or Chardin, as early as 1898 he joined his friends Camoin, Matisse, and Manguin in using the Fauves' palette of living, pure color. One Bastille Day found him standing next to Raoul Dufy painting a revelry of red, white, and blue. A few years later, Marquet painted two magnificent nudes against draperies as vivid in pattern as any Matisse.
One of his teachers, the celebrated artist Gustave Moreau, who was to become a lifelong friend, advised the young Marquet to find his own way in art. Temperamentally a loner, Marquet was incapable of following another artist or any school of painting. Quietly, neither taking nor giving advice, Marquet sought his own way, expressing himself calmly and coolly in his art.
Marquet had a
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