LE HAVRE, FRANCE.- Musée Malraux presents Othon Friesz – The Baroque Fauve, on view through January 27, 2008. Following the retrospectives of Braque and Dufy, the musée Malraux presents a new tribute to the pioneers from Le Havre in modern painting by dedicating an exhibition to Othon Friesz (1879-1949), a companion of Matisse, Vlaminck, Van Dongen and Derain. After La Piscine in Roubaix and the Musée d'art moderne in Céret, this last stop of the exhibition Othon Friesz, le fauve baroque will give us the opportunity to rediscover the most lyrical of the Fauves.

This is the first retrospective since 1979, and it finally gives the artist his legitimate place in the history of art. The nearly 160 pieces brought together present a complete panorama of Friesz' work. Here we have the colored and voluble enthusiasm of his period in Antwerp, where he painted landscapes with Braque in 1906, the Fauvist summits in 1907, in the company of Matisse, Manguin and Vlaminck, then his stay in the French “Midi” the same year, in Cassis and La Ciotat, where his Fauvism with exacerbated colors was tempted by abstraction. After these intense moments he goes through a restructuring phase during which he is attracted by neo-Cezanism. It leads Othon Friesz, at the moment of maturity, to compose work that is marked by a more austere palette but in which his lines remain animated by a Baroque expressiveness.

After World War I, Friesz followed a path parallel to that of most of his former Fauve colleagues and took up sub jects that are rather traditional in painting - still lives, landscapes, history, portraits, allegories, settings, nudes.