Victorien Fabien Vieillard, known as Fabien Launay 1877-1904

Born Victorien Fabien Vieillard, Fabien Launay signed his paintings and drawings using his mother’s maiden name, Rose Launay, in opposition to his father, Louis Vieillard, a chief notary clerk in the Batignolles district, whom he rejected as soon as he embraced his artistic career. From 1888, he attended Lycée Condorcet, where he met the future Hungarian poet and art critic Maurice Cremnitz and the future painter and designer Francis Jourdain, forming a lasting friendship with the latter. Together, the young men quickly turned toward painting, frequenting Parisian galleries such as Le Barc de Boutteville, which showcased the emerging Nabis, and the small shop of Père Tanguy on rue Clauzel, where they discovered the works of Vincent van Gogh.At the age of fifteen, Launay founded a small magazine, L’Art littéraire, with Louis Lormel and Cremnitz in October 1892. In June 1893, he wrote a review of the Salon de la Rose-Croix for the magazine and, in December, an article on Paul Gauguin. Around this early editorial work, he created his first woodcuts and met Alfred Jarry and Léon-Paul Fargue. After finishing school, Launay, like his friend Jourdain, enrolled at the Académie Humbert and Gervex on Boulevard de Clichy, where he met Georges Bottini, with whom he shared a studio at 19 rue des Moines.From 1895 onward, the two friends regularly exhibited at the Salon des Indépendants. They later met the poet Saint-Georges de Bouhélier (whom Launay would portray for Les Hommes d’aujourd’hui, no. 439, 1896) and formed a lifelong friendship with the writer and journalist Gaston de Pawlowski. By 1900, they were also close to Pierre Girieud and a group of artists meeting at the café de la Place Blanche, including Jacques Villon, Edmond Lempereur, Fernand Piet, and writers Félicien Champsaur and Hugues Rebell.Although Launay had managed to exhibit a portrait at the Salon de la Société Nationale des Beaux-Arts in 1899 (cat. no. 862), he was rejected in 1901. From then on, he advocated for a more liberal and open Salon des Refusés, a precursor to the Salon d’Automne. That same year, he exhibited in June with a collective of artists from the Collège d’esthétique moderne in a studio on rue de La Rochefoucauld, led by Saint-Georges de Bouhélier. In August 1903, Gaston de Pawlowski and Launay collaborated on an entire album for L’Assiette au Beurre, satirizing the justice system with powerful and biting drawings.Ravaged by tuberculosis, Launay left Paris on December 6, 1903, to join the open-air sanatorium in the winter town of Arcachon, where he died on February 27, 1904, at the age of 26. After his death, Pawlowski gathered six of his works for a posthumous tribute at the Salon des Indépendants, including a still life (cat. no. 1381).

“His works would later be sought not only for their rarity but also for the acuity of his slightly dark vision serving incisive drawing.” – Pierre Girieud

 

This remark highlights our large still life, recently rediscovered. Signed and dated 1902, it is one of the few surviving works, alongside Le Tournesol, now in the Musée National d’Art Moderne, belonging to the artist’s final corpus, which had attracted the attention of prominent collectors such as Olivier Sainsère and the dealer Berthe Weill. Launay arranged on a table covered with a cloth a small green-bound book, a bottle of wine, some fruit, a cup of coffee, and a large bouquet of chrysanthemums in red, orange, yellow, and white. While the arrangement is relatively traditional, the technique and chromatic palette are resolutely modern and hybrid. The tablecloth and bottle are rendered in broad knife-applied areas, while the flowers are fragmented into thick strokes, showing allegiance to Van Gogh’s style. As in Le Tournesol, the background is brushed in vertical divisionist lines, giving the composition a vibrant quality.In 1902, Launay exhibited two still lifes at the Salon des Indépendants (cat. nos. 1022 and 1023), and a few months later at Berthe Weill’s gallery (cat. no. 11), in a show that included Launay, Girieud, Picasso, and Pichot. Critics, such as Charles Morice in Mercure de France, praised these young painters:

“Two Frenchmen, two Spaniards, have brought together their most recent works. French? Spanish? I speak the truth? No. All four, citizens of Montmartre! Homeland of their desire, atmosphere of their work and ambitions, of their art… Young art, with its audacity and fortune, its weaknesses, its dangers… nothing more interesting or moving than this sort of pre-dawn of the spirits… If you want to know the present directions of art… There is much realism, even brutalism, in the paintings on rue Victor-Massé, but oddly, this servile devotion to the outer forms of things combines with a beautiful decorative instinct… In Launay and Picasso, art hits the negative, that wall where generations without love inevitably break.”

 

While Picasso went on to have a celebrated career, Launay’s trajectory was tragically cut short. This still life remains a rare testament to a talent that may never have fully realized its promise.