Le marché à Falaise

Le marché à Falaise was painted in 1905 when Dufy was most heavily influenced by the Fauve artists. The Salon d'Automne of 1905 had provoked an outcry from many but had had a profound effect on Dufy, who suddenly saw a new way of painting, a way that concentrated not on light and its values, as so much of the Impressionists' work had, but instead on colour. 'Painting,' he said, 'means creating an image which is not the image of the appearance of things, but which has the power of their reality' (Dufy, quoted in D. Perez-Tibi, Dufy, London, 1989, p. 22). In Le marché à Falaise, Dufy has adopted many of the brash colours of the Fauves but has also introduced softer, paler colours into his palette, creating a very personalized response to this new mode of painting. Dufy also employed a method of accentuating his fields of colour by enclosing them within thick bold outlines, so that each one sings with a brilliance enforced by its neighbours, creating a sense of pure colour throughout the work.

Dufy's Fauve paintings were essentially his purest. He was filled with enthusiasm and was experimenting relentlessly with juxtaposition of colours, with lively modes of execution. This was to an extent dampened in 1907 when the artist came under the influence of the art of Cézanne. From then on, Dufy paid increasing attention to the potentials of composition which, while making his work more mature, nonetheless denied it the sheer enthusiasm that makes paintings such as Le marché à Falaise so successful.