Raoul Dufy

Germaine Dufy (by inheritance from the artist)

Gérard Oury, Paris (by descent from the above)

Wildenstein Gallery, New York (acquired from the above)

Acquired from the above by the present owner in 1973

Dufy's Le Casino is a celebration of the activities of the leisure class.  Painted one year after the infamous debut of the Fauves at the Salon d'Automne, the present work demonstrates the feverish coloration and energy that characterizes the best landscapes of the Fauvist tradition.  But the present picture was more than just a product of this new trend in painting.  Dufy was a great admirer of Impressionist landscape painting, and Le Casino 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. 

As Alvin Martin and Judi Freeman have written, “What distinguished the work of the Fauves from Le Havre (Dufy, Friesz and Braque) from that of Matisse and company was the treatment of surface and color.  Whereas the Norman artists have been steadfastly loyal to the Impressionist approach to painting, Matisse,  Derain, Vlaminck and the others borrowed extensively from the far more audacious generation that succeeded the Impressionists. The Norman Fauves found irresistible the full-blown Fauve manner of painting, characterized by highly saturated color and the laying in of brilliant tones side by side, and they inevitably responded to it in their own work, produced back in their native Normandy…" (Alvin Martin and Judi Freeman, “The Distant Cousins in Normandy: Braque, Dufy and Friesz,” The Fauve Landscape, New York, 1990, p. 221-22).