Raoul Dufy

Galerie Mizrachi, France
Mr. and Mrs. Robert B. Mayer, Chicago (acquired from the above in 1957)
Private Collection, Japan

From the beginning of the 1920s the pageantry of the racecourse became one of Raoul Dufy’s favorite themes.  Dufy frequented the horse races with leading creators of fashion such as Paul Poiret and Bianchini who prodded the artist to study the fashionable ladies and gentleman who attended the races.  Friends who accompanied Dufy on his expeditions to the track recalled that at this time he became more interested in the colors of the horses and jockeys, their movement, and in the animation of the spectators in the crowd.

In 1924 the evolution of Dufy’s racecourse scenes can been examined as the “figures became essences, wraiths, or like flowers, everything again given up to the crisp, jaunty interaction between green turf, red brick buildings, white railings, multi-colored crowds, green trees against blue sky with sprightly puffs of clouds” (Bryan Robertson, Raoul Dufy 1877-1953, 1963 p. 27).  Epsom, executed in 1937, captures the anticipation before the start of a big race.  “On the open track he was naturally led to divide the picture-space into vertical strips, of blue, green and yellow, for example... the crowd in the stands-these were rendered by a simple outlined drowned by the mass of ambient color” (Dora Perez-Tibi, Dufy, New York, 1989, pp.158-162).

In Epsom Dufy exhibits his talents in the technique of couleur-lumière, in which black and white recede and color is propelled to the foreground.  Dufy has defined the foreground with a large strokes of color used to define both the turf as well as the standing figures.  The pagentry is accentuated by the Royal colors flying over the grandstand as well as the packed tents and canopies in the infield.  As Dora Perez-Tibi explains, “These racecourse scenes allowed Dufy to put his ‘couleur- lumière’  theory into practice.  He decided to convey light by means of colour; the absence of colour chatacterizes the unlit area…  For Dufy, the balance of the composition comes from the distribution of all the points of light in the center of each element of the painting.  It was here that he found the secret of his composition” (ibid., New York, 1989, pp.158-162).

Fig. 1  Raoul Dufy in his Paris studio, 1935