Henri Matisse, Charles Camoin and Albert Marquet, on horseback in front of an airship, circa 1912, Archives Camoin
Born in 1879 in Marseille, Charles Camoin belonged to a generation of artists who started painting at the turn of the 20th century. He was very close to Matisse, Marquet and Manguin, whom he had met while studying at the École des Beaux-Arts in Paris in Gustave Moreau’s studio. He took part in the 1905 Salon d’Automne where his works were shown, alongside theirs, in a room dubbed the ‘wild beasts cage’ (la cage aux fauves).
Associated with Fauvism from then on, the young painter quickly achieved success and joined the international avant-garde circles. He regularly exhibited in Paris in major Salons and young galleries (Salon des Indépendants, Salon d’Automne, Galerie Berthe Weill, Galerie Daniel-Henry Kahnweiler, or Galerie Eugène Druet) in Paris and abroad, on occasion of great avant-garde events (Galerie Mánes, Salon de la Libre Esthétique, Sonderbund and Berlin Secession, Armory Show, etc.). His work was particularly popular in Germany where he signed a contract with the art dealer Ludwig Schames in Frankfurt in 1908.
Camoin’s career was marked by many trips. He regularly left Paris to spend time in the South of France where his family lived (Marseille, Cassis, La Ciotat, etc.) and stayed in Italy, Corsica, London, Spain and Morocco. These travels provided many opportunities to approach the Southern light differently than in his native region.
Camoin sur le motif, Saint-Tropez, Plage de Pampelonne, 1957, Archives Camoin
In his days, Camoin acted as the bearer of Paul Cézanne’s theories. He was deeply influenced by the ‘master’ of Aix whom he met during his military service, between 1900 and 1903, and deeply admired. His close ties with Cézanne, his many visits and their correspondence had a lasting influence on the young painter who saw him as his mentor. ‘I speak to you as a father’, Cézanne told him at the time.
This relationship shaped Camoin’s lyrical realism for a long time to come. He shared with the master an acute, sensory understanding of landscape and tended to reconcile the spontaneity of the coloured brushstrokes with the meticulous organisation of the composition. He always worked in close contact with nature, which he synthesised on the canvas by means of colour and matter. If he freed himself from the descriptive nature of representation, he developed a personal approach based on a subtle balance between the condensation of form and faithful depiction of the motif. He aimed to produce a coloured harmony equivalent to his sensory experience through plastic expressiveness typical of modernism.
Despite his early successes, Camoin remained a worrier, often plagued by self-doubt. His art underwent change in the 1910s, shifting toward expressionism. At the time, he forged a sentimental and artistic relationship with the painter Émilie Charmy. He frequently destroyed his paintings in his studio. The most famous of these destructive episodes took place in June 1914 – the notorious case of the ‘slashed canvases’ – which gave rise to a lawsuit against the art dealer Francis Carco. The verdict in 1931 provided a founding framework for intellectual property law.
After being mobilised during the 1914-1918 war, which left him psychologically scarred, he shared his time between a studio in Montmartre and one in Saint-Tropez where he settled in 1921, with his wife Charlotte Prost (Lola), soon joined by their daughter Anne-Marie (Annie), born in 1933. From the 1920s, he was represented by the art dealers Charles Vildrac and Marcel Bernheim.
In 1955, he was named officer of the Legion of Honour and was awarded the Grand Prix at the Menton Biennale. In 1961, he went with his wife to New York, where the Hammer Galleries held a major retrospective of his work. The last surviving member of the Fauve group, he died in 1965 in his studio in Montmartre.
Charles and Lola Camoin on board the Flandre, crossing the Atlantic, May 1961, Archives Camoin
