From 1907, Camoin settled in Montmartre, a Parisian bohemian neighbourhood, and forged a relationship with the painter Émilie Charmy. His exploration of plastic expression led him down a less optimistic, more anxious and reflective path.
His painting was less about describing external reality than translating its perception through a singular combination of shapes and colours. On the canvas, a conflict arose between faithfulness to the study of nature, rooted in a naturalistic tradition, and pure, self-referential painting.
This tension was made manifest by the intense stylisation of his paintings. Their overall composition was marked by a strong sense of rhythm and structure, their simplified shapes reduced to their most basic elements through large flat tints of colour bordered by a black line, also present in Charmy or André Derain’s contemporary paintings. His palette was darker, and the paint applied in thick, nervous brushstrokes.
His Parisian scenes were often based on daring, high-angle views, in rhythm with the frenetic tempo of the city where human figures are represented by simple black commas. Even his Southern landscapes, like those painted in Corsica with Charmy in 1910, grew in intensity. His compositions were extremely dense, with spatial and atmospheric depth reduced to a minimum, and saturated, opaque colours.
If Camoin freed himself from the imitation of nature, he did not renounce the subject: the figure or the landscape were so many means of expressing his inner vision, that through which he intuitively perceived the world.
From 1908 onwards, Camoin’s works were shown, along those of his Fauve friends, at major European avant-garde exhibitions, particularly in Germany where the Marseille painter signed a contract with Ludwig Schames, a Frankfurt art dealer.
Camoin did not subscribe to the dramatic exaggeration and revolt of the German Expressionists, but his formalist research betrayed just as much inner turmoil – at once Baudelairean melancholy and civilisational anxiety –, symptomatic of the affirmation of modern subjectivity.
