Roving revolutionary

Albert Marquet
Connaught Brown, 2 Albemarle Street, W1, until 26 June

Amid the usual hype about the record price achieved by an Andy Warhol self-portrait at Sotheby’s New York on 12 May, another artist’s record passed unnoticed. At the Impressionist & Modern Art sale the week before, Albert Marquet’s ‘Le Pavillon Bleu’ fetched $1.5 million.

‘Albert who?’ some of you may be asking — but when Marquet painted this picture in 1905 he was a founder member of the first revolutionary art movement of the 20th century, one of the gang of young painters in pure colours surrounding Matisse who would be branded ‘Fauves’ at that year’s Salon d’Automne. Without Fauvism, there would be no Warhol screenprints and the Pope of Pop might have remained a footnote in art history as a shoe illustrator.

It was at the Ecole des Arts Décoratifs in 1890 that the diminutive student from Bordeaux with the pebble lenses, the gimpy leg and the mordant wit met the older, more sophisticated Matisse, who became his lifelong friend and comrade-in-arms against the Institut. They progressed together to the Beaux-Arts, where they were taught by Gustave Moreau, and copied paintings side by side in the Louvre. But Marquet’s preferred school of art was the street. His schoolboy habit of bunking off to the Bordeaux docks to draw stayed with him; under his leadership, parties of truants from the life room took to the streets in pursuit of ‘anything that moves’. If a subject moved too far, Marquet gave chase with his sketchpad; some people laughed at him, others hurled abuse.

The two marvellous drawings in Connaught Brown’s new Albert Marquet exhibition — the first since Wildenstein’s 25 years ago — prove the abuse was worth it.