L'Estaque

Émilie Charmy was among the first women to exhibit paintings in the Fauvist style. Traveling to rugged sites on France’s Mediterranean coast, such as L’Estaque, depicted here, she created landscapes suffused with emotion and subjective expression. Laying down vibrant color in broad unstructured planes, she composed the scene as a collection of loosely joined organic forms. The swelling and tapering shapes along the composition’s edges produce a dynamic sense of movement that dissipates at the center, where we glimpse the calm waters of the Bay of Marseille.

Charmy was celebrated during her lifetime, but the accolades she received feel wildly gendered today. In 1921, for example, a French writer described her as an artist who “sees like a woman and paints like a man…from the one she takes grace and from the other strength, and this is what makes her such a strange and powerful painter who holds our attention.”