Landscape at Cadaqués by André Derain

The encounter of Derain André with the geometric structures of his contemporaries marks a major turning point in his artistic career. This canvas painting, bearing the generic title “Landscape at Cadaqués”, bears witness to a research into space inspired by Cubist aesthetics. The painter reinvents the urban landscape by cutting it into simple and rigorous geometric volumes.

A village perched on a hill is organized in a complex entanglement of houses with angular and schematic shapes. The dwellings, painted in shades of beige, grey, and raw umber, rise toward a slender bell tower that dominates the hill. On the right, a wide section of hill or a gently sloping dirt path, treated in sand tones, extends toward the bottom of the canvas. In the distance, a deep blue sea stands out under a sky covered with greyish and white clouds. Two tiny silhouettes of walkers are sketched at the bottom left of the composition, highlighting the monumental scale of the site.

This work shows the painter’s incredible technical mastery in the geometric simplification of forms and the reduction of the color palette. The brushstrokes are applied with confidence, revealing an exceptional craftsmanship in the construction of volumes. This work strongly illustrates the transition toward modern art at the beginning of the century.