As a young man Vlaminck had distanced himself from militarism and nationalism, and had even explored the ideas of communism and anarchism. Little is known about his political stance during the time when France under German occupation. In 1943 he called the war years ‘the most brutal and bleakest time that France has ever experienced’.
But two confirmed facts seem to indicate his collaboration with the National Socialist occupying forces.
1. The trip to Germany
In November 1941 Vlaminck travelled to Germany on the invitation of the Propaganda Ministry in Berlin. Other participants were the painters André Derain, Kees van Dongen and Othon Friesz, the sculptors Paul Belmondo and Charles Despiau, and the director of the École des Beaux-Arts, Paul Landowski.
Some participants regretted their participation in retrospect and made critical remarks about it, particularly Paul Landowski. But Vlaminck published several texts giving effusive praise to National Socialist artistic and cultural policy, which he found exemplary: ‘After its liberation from badly assimilated foreign influences, German painting will once again take a national path offering it greater freedom of expression.’
2. Acquaintanceship with Arno Breker
The instigator of the trip to Germany is thought to have been Arno Breker (1900–1991), one of Hitler’s favourite artists. Vlaminck knew him quite well; they probably became acquainted through the gallerist Alfred Flechtheim. Breker bought work by Vlaminck, and made a portrait bust of him in 1943. When Breker was given a large exhibition in occupied Paris in 1942, Vlaminck was among the guests of honour. He also published a polemical text in which he aligned himself with Breker’s vilification of Pablo Picasso, who according to Vlaminck had ‘led French painting into the most deadly cul-de-sac’.
This was not simply Vlaminck pandering to German cultural policy; it was also self-contradictory. For before the First World War Picasso’s cubism had seemed so progressive to Vlaminck that he embraced it in a series of works.
