In the 1950s, Camoin was one of the last living Fauve artists. Marquet had died in 1947, Manguin in 1949, Matisse in 1954…
Camoin decided at the time to keep a diary to put his aesthetic thoughts in writing. Marked by Montaigne and Paul Valéry, they dealt with his understanding of art and his own creative process, in particular the genesis of painting and the decisive instant when the composition and the spatial and colour arrangement of the painting coalesce. These concerns about the very nature of his art and the way it operated coincided with the post-war aesthetic context and its abstract tendencies.
This phase of self-analysis led, implicitly or not, to a self-reflexive pictorial practice. Painting itself became a subject matter and a question with the flowering of themes and processes that referred to themselves. The motif of the studio held an important place in his work back then, as exemplified by the views of his Provençal studio window or the new subjects which he sought out and painted from inside his ‘studio car’ called Cocotte. He worked in a series, painting variations on the same theme or returning to old subjects painted in the 1920s. Seriality was first and foremost constitutive of the creative act: it was an ‘exercise in composition’ (Camoin) through which he put the different plastic potentialities of painting – i.e. space, colour and matter – into practice.
Even though Camoin always drew on the great tradition of Western painting, he started exploring art history more intensely, another source of reflexivity. He specifically examined the colourists (Titian, Veronese, Rubens, Rembrandt, El Greco, Goya, Delacroix), 18th century French art (Boucher, Fragonard) and 19th century painters such as Ingres, Courbet, Manet, Renoir and, needless to say, Cézanne.
He reintroduced Cézanian motifs such as the Mont Sainte-Victoire or the bathers and made paintings or studies after old masters, a sort of technical memento to better assimilate their methods which he appropriated and combined with his own formalist and stylistic choices.
This was not about creating a copy or pastiche, but rather engaging with models as a source of creation. This reinterpretation was anchored in erudition, the respect of great tradition and the inclusion of his own principles, and resulted in a plastic synthesis connected to modernism. Camoin’s ‘painting of painting’ was both a theoretical reflection on art and an artistic creation.
Ultimately, Camoin adopted the position of the classics by returning again and again to the same model: the Mediterranean nature and light which he reinvented through seriality and plastic combinations using a Fauve approach. The composition was shaped by his perception of colour and subordinated to expressive ends as he played with the quantity of paint with slender brushstrokes. However, unlike his predecessors, he dismissed any mythological, religious, literary or political references.
His self-reflexive painting abolished any justification coming from outside itself. As such, representation turned in on itself and did not unlock any hidden meaning. To Camoin, who embraced this existential void, painting’s raison d’être was the affirmation of life: ‘art that represents life, escapes, like life, all theory, all explanation. The artwork’s only law is to be filled with life.’ (Camoin’s diary, 20 May 1963)
After the war, the Fauve artists earned new institutional recognition. If some paintings by Camoin had been bought by the French state from the 1900s, their entry in the public collections was boosted. Major exhibitions on Moreau’s studio were curated and Camoin was the subject of a retrospective at the Hammer Galleries in 1961 in New York where he travelled with Lola. These different events helped legitimise Fauvism as a significant and classical movement in art history. Initially condemned in its early days, Fauvism became the official art of the beginning of the 20th century.
