Maurice de Vlaminck was born on 4 April 1876 in Paris. His father ran a shop selling musical instruments, while his mother worked as a piano teacher. The family moved to Chatou, near Paris, in 1893. Vlaminck, who originally wanted to be a musician and composer, began to paint as a hobby. He received his first drawing lessons from Jules Robichon.
On 5 September 1896, Vlaminck married Suzanne Berly, with whom he had three daughters: Madeleine (1896), Solange (1898) and Yolande (1905). To support his family, Vlaminck worked as a violinist and also earned money by winning prizes in cycle races. In 1897 he contracted typhoid fever, which meant the end of his racing career. In the same year, he began his three-year military service and began to study the ideas of communism and anarchism, in particular by reading the writings of Karl Marx and Élisée Reclus.
In 1900, Vlaminck met André Derain, who encouraged him to become a painter. From December 1900 to September 1901, the two shared a studio on the island of Chatou in the Seine. In 1901, Vlaminck attended the first Vincent van Gogh retrospective in Paris at the Bernheim-Jeune gallery, where he met Henri Matisse.
In 1905, Vlaminck exhibited his work at the Salon des Indépendants (24 March - 30 April) and together with Charles Camoin, Derain, Albert Marquet and Matisse at the Salon d'Automne (18 October - 25 November). The critic Louis Vauxcelles described the artists around Matisse at the Salon d'Automne as 'fauves' (wild beasts) because of their impetuous use of colour. In November of the same year, the art dealer Ambroise Vollard acquired much of Vlaminck's studio inventory, allowing the artist to concentrate on painting.
In 1907, a memorial exhibition for Paul Cézanne at the Salon des Indépendants in Paris triggered a veritable Cézanne fever. In 1908/09, Georges Braque and Pablo Picasso began to paint their first Cubist works, while Vlaminck also explored the Cubist formal language.
In October 1910, Vlaminck participated in the 'Young French Painters' exhibition at the Barmer Kunsthalle, where his works were also shown. A year later, in 1911, August von der Heydt bought Vlaminck's Still Life at the Salon d'Automne, which is still in the Von der Heydt Museum. In 1912, six paintings by Vlaminck were shown at the 'Sonderbund' exhibition in Cologne, and the Berlin avant-garde gallery Der Sturm presented Vlaminck in its second exhibition.In 1913, Vlaminck signed a two-year exclusive contract with the art dealer Daniel Kahnweiler and took part in the Armory Show in New York, which was also shown in Chicago and Boston. In December of the same year, Alfred Flechtheim showed Vlaminck in a group exhibition at his Düsseldorf gallery. In 1914, Vlaminck was called up for military service, and the First World War marked a turning away from the Parisian avant-garde.
After the war, in 1919, Vlaminck bought a small property in Valmondois, north of Paris, where he set up a studio. The following year he moved to Auvers-sur-Oise, where his great idol Vincent van Gogh had spent the last days of his life.
In 1920, Vlaminck took part in the exhibition 'Works of art from private collections in Elberfeld' at the Lohmann House in Elberfeld. In 1925, he moved to the village of La Tourillière, about 120 kilometres west of Paris. Three years later, in 1928, he married Berthe Combe, with whom he had two daughters, Edwige (born in 1920) and Godeliève (born in 1927).
In 1929, Vlaminck had his first major solo exhibition in Germany at Alfred Flechtheim's gallery in Düsseldorf. In the same year he published his first autobiographical book, 'Gefährliche Wende. Notes of a Painter'. In 1937, he took part in the 'Exhibition of Contemporary French Art' at the Prussian Academy of Arts in Berlin, which was attended by Hitler and Göring.
Paintings by Vlaminck were confiscated as 'degenerate' from eight German museums, including the collections in Elberfeld and Barmen.
In 1941, Vlaminck took part in a Nazi propaganda trip to Germany. After the liberation of France in 1944, he was banned from exhibiting his work for a year because of his political stance during the German occupation.
In 1956, a Vlaminck retrospective was held at the Charpentier Gallery in Paris. Two years later, on 11 October 1958, Maurice de Vlaminck died in La Tourillière.
