Raoul Dufy

Private Collection, France

Maurice Laffaille, Raoul Dufy. Catalogue raisonné de l'œuvre peint, Geneva, 1972, vol. I, no. 211, illustrated p. 183

The canvas is unlined. Apart from a 1 by 3cm. area of retouching towards the centre of the top edge, and a few very small spots and hairlines of retouching, mostly in the sky and at the edges, visible under ultra-violet light, this work is in good condition. Colours: Overall brighter and more varied; in particular the green and purple tones are more pronounced in the original.
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Painted in 1906, at the height of Dufy's Fauve style, the present work is a wonderfully vibrant image of the streets of the artist's native Le Havre during the 14^th July festivities. Throughout his career, Dufy returned to his hometown to paint its port and the Bay of Sainte-Adresse. In 1900 he left Le Havre to pursue his studies at the Ecole des Beaux-Arts in Paris, where for several years he studied the works of Manet and the Impressionists, particularly Pissarro. The artistic watershed in Dufy's career occurred in 1905 when he saw Matisse's Luxe, calme et volupté at the Salon d'Automne. It was not so much the Divisionist technique that impressed the young painter – he was already familiar with Signac's work from an exhibition in December 1904 – but colours which seemed to express the inner sensations of the painter. At this point, Dufy claimed, 'I understood the new raison d'être of painting and impressionist realism lost its charm for me as I beheld this miracle of the creative imagination at play, in colour and drawing' (quoted in J. Lassaigne, Dufy, New York, n.d., p. 22).

 

Le Havre, 14 Juillet was painted in 1906, which proved to be a seminal year in the career of the young artist. He exhibited in both the Salon des Indépendants and the Salon d'Automne, and opened his first one-man show at the gallery of Berthe Weill in Paris. He also found time to travel to Normandy with his companion, the painter Albert Marquet, and the two worked side by side in Le Havre (figs. 1 & 2), Honfleur and Trouville. The works produced during this trip, which return to themes he frequently painted at earlier stages in his career, illustrate how his aesthetic priorities had been transformed by Fauvism. The vibrant, spare works such as Fête nautique (fig. 1) and La Plage du Havre (fig. 3) show how Dufy had reinvented his artistic vision, giving priority to colour and form as an expression of his inner vision. In an unpublished manuscript Dufy explained his understanding of the significance of colour: 'When I talk about colour, it will be understood that I am not talking about the colours of nature, but about the colours of painting, about the colour of our palettes, the words from which we form our pictorial language..., do not imagine I am confusing colour with painting, but since I make colour the creative element of light – as we should never forget – since I see colour itself as nothing but a generator of light, it is clear that it shares this role with drawing, the great 'builder' of painting, its principal element' (quoted in D. Perez-Tibi, Dufy, New York, 1989, p. 25).

 

However, over and beyond the use of Fauvist colour, the present work, as well as La Rue pavoisée (fig. 3), illustrate how Dufy had begun to simplify the compositional forms of his works. Strident blocs of colour interact with the rhythms created by horizontal and diagonal flag poles, demonstrating Dufy's move towards a more abstracted vision of reality. This tendency might have owed something the influence of Gauguin; the 1906 Salon d'Automne had brought his work to the general public's attention, and the simplified planes and blocs of colour in his works had a profound influence of numerous artists. The simplicity and lack of ornament in these works is a signal of the direction Dufy's art was taking in this critical period in his career.

 

As Dora Perez-Tibi wrote about the trends in Dufy's art, 'Dufy's style was becoming increasingly spare and synthetic... Superfluous details are suppressed in favour of a rigorous construction of the composition as a whole, based on a linear plan reduced to an interplay of horizontals and diagonals which make a vast abstract plastic space against which figures stand out in harmony of colour [...] This desire to stress linear rhythm in the construction of his composition is seen in the works painted in 1907 [...] while he remained devoted to a sustained chromaticism, he arranged his forms in a tiered perspective: the greatest emphasis is placed on a rigorous geometrical style which defines the structure repeated throughout the composition' (ibid., pp. 30-31). 

 

 

Fig. 1, Albert Marquet, Le 14 juillet au Havre, 1906, oil on canvas, Musée National d'Art Moderne, Paris

Fig. 2, Raoul Dufy, La Rue pavoisée, 1906, oil on canvas, Musée National d'Art Moderne, Paris

Fig. 3, Raoul Dufy, La Plage du Havre, 1906, oil on canvas, Private Collection