Derain, was an artist truly inspired by the old master. Having worked and known Picasso he believed that there would be a "return to order" in art which caused him to avoid the Cubist movement as well as the abstract movement, basing his philosophy on nature.

DERAIN'S THOUGHTS ON ART

Everything comes from nature and everything returns there. . . It is impossible to produce an art anterior to or exterior to the real . . or then you're working with more poverty than reality itself . . . which is typical of decadent art. To use lines, planes, volumes, color that we borrow necessarily from nature without giving them a function constitutes a decadent practice that is equivalent to a truncated and failed parody of the exterior world. Do you know a painter who has invented a color different from those that compose the solar spectrum?

One must seize nature in her economy, her course, her imaginative process. In other words, one must adapt her style, putting oneself in the interior of this style instead of trying to recopy the effects, the externals.

Style is the constant coming and going of man toward the real, a perpetual interpolation of the subjective and objective. . . . It tends to identify what we have of esprit with the esprit of things. One must not say more nor less than the subject demands. That is what nature does. [1939]

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