Raoul Dufy

Iowa City, University of Iowa Museum of Art, Paintings, Drawings, Sculpture, Prints from Twenty-Three Iowa Collections, 1961, no. 9
Museum of Modern Art, New York; Kimbell Art Museum, Forth Worth; San Francisco, Museum of Modern Art, The "Wild Beasts": Fauvism and Its Affinities, 1976

Nautical themes feature recurrently throughout Dufy's production, and the most inspired of these pictures are those that he completed on the Normandy coast during his Fauvist period.  The present painting from 1906 features a colorful array of maritime flags hanging from the rafters of an open-air pavilion along the seaside.  Although it is not specified as such in the catalogue raisonné, the location is Le Havre, where a crowd has gathered to watch the Regatta.  Around the time he completed this picture, Dufy executed a similar composition, La tribune des régates au Hauvre (Laffaille, no. 112), depicting the same site.  The present work, however, provides a more expansive view of the flags and the activities of the spectators.  Like most of Dufy's pictures of the Normandy coast, these canvases portray the summertime activities of the leisure class and are reminiscent of similar compositions by Monet and Renoir.   In this work, Dufy depicts a lively cluster of well-dressed ladies and gentlemen as they enjoy the sights of the seaside.  The activity in the lower half of the canvas is complemented by the display of nautical bands and flags featured in the top half.  Almost directly in the center of the composition is the French flag, a symbol that appeared prominently in an important series of canvases commemorating Bastille day that Dufy also completed in 1906.

While Fête Nautique is clearly a Fauve picture in the boldness of its coloration and expressive brushwork, it also shows an allegiance to Impressionism in the immediacy of its execution.  Both styles of painting played a significant role in Dufy's work of this period, and his gleanings from these two movements resulted in compositions that set him apart from his contemporaries.  John Elderfield notes, for example, that although Dufy addressed the same subjects in Normandy as his fellow Fauvist painter, Albert Marquet, his pictures of these locations "...show that Dufy, despite his indebtedness to his friend, remained attached to the looser pictorial structures of Impressionism.  His Fête nautique of 1906 evokes the bustling throng of paintings such as Renoir's Moulin de la Galette.  When Dufy looked to the ocean for his subjects, his spatially floating colorism was further developed in the isolated arcs, curves, and even circles of color he began to use.  These led through the marines and landscapes of 1907 to some remarkable café scenes of early 1908..." (John Elderfield, The "Wild Beasts": Fauvism and Its Affinities (exhibition catalogue), The Museum of Modern Art, New York, 1976, p. 74 & 78).