Abandoned House in Provence

Abandoned House in Provence from the 1920-1935 period is a landscape from Derain's middle and late career, when he was painting the Provencal countryside in a style that combined the structural solidity of Cézanne with the tonal restraint of his neo-classical turn. The abandoned house provides a focal point for a composition that emphasizes the warm tones and rugged geometry of the Provencal landscape—the same landscape that Cézanne and later the Cubists had made central to the development of modern painting. Derain's treatment is more restrained than either Cézanne or the Cubists, reflecting his retreat from the avant-garde toward a more traditional approach to landscape painting.

Derain's Provencal landscapes occupy an ambiguous position in the history of 20th-century painting because they combine the subject matter of the most radical modernist experiments (the Provencal landscape that Cézanne and the Cubists made central to modernism) with a style that explicitly rejects modernist innovation in favor of traditional values. The abandoned house is both a document of the Provencal landscape and a symbol of Derain's abandonment of the avant-garde.

Abandoned House in Provence is Derain between modernism and tradition: the Provencal landscape that Cézanne and the Cubists made central to modernism, painted in a style that explicitly rejects modernist innovation. The abandoned house is both a document of the landscape and a symbol of Derain's own abandonment of the Fauvist avant-garde—a ruin in more senses than one.