Still Life with Pumpkin
André DERAIN
(French, 1880-1954)
Still Life with Pumpkin
Date1939
Mediumoil on canvas
Dimensionsoverall: 40 x 52 in. (101.6 x 132.1 cm)
frame: 53 x 65 x 3 in. (134.6 x 165.1 x 7.6 cm)
ClassificationPAINTINGS
Credit LineSBMA, Bequest of Wright S. Ludington
Object number1993.1.4
Subject(s)
- fruit
- food
- still lifes
Collection
- 20th century European
On View
Not on viewCollections
Label TextDerain’s early Fauve canvases were celebrated in exhibitions throughout Germany during the 1920s, but by the 1930s, the Nazis began to use them as examples of supposedly corrupt artistic trends. The artist’s paintings appeared in highly politicized exhibitions like Kulturbolschewistische Bilder (“Images of Cultural Bolshevism”) at the Kunsthalle Mannheim as early as 1933; they were also confiscated, along with other avant-garde works, by a committee empowered by the Minister for Public Enlightenment and Propaganda, Josef Goebbels. Some of these stolen works were exhibited in the 1937 Entartete Kunst (“Degenerate Art”) exhibition in Munich—the most popular blockbuster show of modern art ever, with more than two million visitors. The “Degenerate Art” show served as a foil to officially condoned, Nazi-approved art that embraced realism and figuration instead of abstraction, often through pastoral scenes of family life that conveyed the blood-and-soil ideology of the Nazis; these works were exhibited in a contemporaneous exhibition titled Grosse Deutsche Kunstausstellung (“Great German Art Exhibition”). By the late 1930s, Derain took up a retardataire style in an attempt to appeal to conservative tastes; these paintings depart dramatically from the vivid canvases he had produced just decades earlier. His Still Life with Pumpkin (1939), with its painterly illusion of vanitas objects set against an anonymous background, could even be mistaken for Baroque realism of the 17th century.
