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拍品專文
By 1905, Raoul Dufy had been painting for nearly a decade in an Impressionist idiom, rendering the nuances of the northern light around his hometown of Le Havre in muted, pastel tones, much as Eugène Boudin and Claude Monet, two other natives of Le Havre, had done before him. In March of that year, Dufy experienced a revelation: at the Salon des Indépendants, he was awestruck by Henri Matisse’s Luxe, calme, et volupté (Musée d'Art Moderne de Paris), with its boldly subjective organization of pure color. “At the sight of that picture,” Dufy recalled, “I understood the new raison d’être of painting, and Impressionist realism lost all its charm for me as I looked at this miracle of creative imagination at work in color and line. I immediately grasped the mechanics of art” (quoted in M. Giry, Fauvism: Origins and Development, New York, 1982, p. 135).
Back in Le Havre, Dufy put these lessons to work in his own art, introducing more vibrant and expressive color into his trademark coastal scenes. “Until then I had created beaches in the Impressionist style, and I had reached the saturation point with them,” he explained. “[Now] I began to examine my tubes of paint and brushes. With these how can I attain not only what I see but that which is, that which exists for me, my reality?” (quoted in J. Freeman, The Fauve Landscape, exh. cat., Los Angeles County Museum of Art, 1990, p. 94). The sensational Salon d’Automne of 1905—at which the critic Louis Vauxcelles bestowed upon Matisse, André Derain, and their cohorts, the derisive sobriquet Les Fauves (“The Wild Beasts”)—put Dufy on a new path and allowed him to free himself from a direct representation of reality and instead push his art into new realms of subjective vision. By early the next year, he was working in a full-blown Fauvist manner, painting with pure, unmodulated pigments in bold, impetuous strokes.
Dufy painted Le bal champêtre in 1906, at the height of the Fauvist movement. While Matisse and Derain went to Collioure and L’Estaque in search of southern light, Dufy remained in his native Normandy, painting alongside Albert Marquet at Le Havre, Trouville, Honfleur, Dieppe, and Fécamp. Unlike the Midi, this was the Impressionists’ home, which Dufy now consciously re-interpreted with brilliantly heightened color.
In the present painting, Dufy depicts a festive rural Normand ball—perhaps celebrating a national holiday, the men are depicted wearing modern black coats and bowler hats, while the women are dressed in long pink, blue and purple dresses, heighted with white impastos. The right side of the composition is festooned in French flags hanging from polls, their distinct blue white and red color combination enlivening the scene into a festive spectacle.
In Le bal champêtre, Dufy seems to revel in the freedom and excitement of his newfound Fauve technique. The composition is dominated with greens, pinks, purples, reds and blues. These simple yet exuberant pigments are applied with free and lively strokes of paint. Flat passages of color contrast with the dynamic and varied brushwork—hatch marks, arcs, squiggles, and circles—which Dufy uses to bring this rural fête to life.
The compositional structure of Le bal champêtre is equally dynamic. All the elements at center—a seated man enjoying a glass of wine, as well as a few heads and colossal tree trunks—appear larger than the people and trees around them. Moreover, the women dancing at lower right and the couple chatting at lower left are slightly tilted outwards, while the trees at upper right and left are titled inwards, creating a distorted curvilinear perspective, akin to a fisheye effect. This avant-garde configuration, coupled with the painting’s wild colors and brushwork, heighten the festive and frenzied nature of the painting’s subject, rooting it in a joyous sense of celebration.
Back in Le Havre, Dufy put these lessons to work in his own art, introducing more vibrant and expressive color into his trademark coastal scenes. “Until then I had created beaches in the Impressionist style, and I had reached the saturation point with them,” he explained. “[Now] I began to examine my tubes of paint and brushes. With these how can I attain not only what I see but that which is, that which exists for me, my reality?” (quoted in J. Freeman, The Fauve Landscape, exh. cat., Los Angeles County Museum of Art, 1990, p. 94). The sensational Salon d’Automne of 1905—at which the critic Louis Vauxcelles bestowed upon Matisse, André Derain, and their cohorts, the derisive sobriquet Les Fauves (“The Wild Beasts”)—put Dufy on a new path and allowed him to free himself from a direct representation of reality and instead push his art into new realms of subjective vision. By early the next year, he was working in a full-blown Fauvist manner, painting with pure, unmodulated pigments in bold, impetuous strokes.
Dufy painted Le bal champêtre in 1906, at the height of the Fauvist movement. While Matisse and Derain went to Collioure and L’Estaque in search of southern light, Dufy remained in his native Normandy, painting alongside Albert Marquet at Le Havre, Trouville, Honfleur, Dieppe, and Fécamp. Unlike the Midi, this was the Impressionists’ home, which Dufy now consciously re-interpreted with brilliantly heightened color.
In the present painting, Dufy depicts a festive rural Normand ball—perhaps celebrating a national holiday, the men are depicted wearing modern black coats and bowler hats, while the women are dressed in long pink, blue and purple dresses, heighted with white impastos. The right side of the composition is festooned in French flags hanging from polls, their distinct blue white and red color combination enlivening the scene into a festive spectacle.
In Le bal champêtre, Dufy seems to revel in the freedom and excitement of his newfound Fauve technique. The composition is dominated with greens, pinks, purples, reds and blues. These simple yet exuberant pigments are applied with free and lively strokes of paint. Flat passages of color contrast with the dynamic and varied brushwork—hatch marks, arcs, squiggles, and circles—which Dufy uses to bring this rural fête to life.
The compositional structure of Le bal champêtre is equally dynamic. All the elements at center—a seated man enjoying a glass of wine, as well as a few heads and colossal tree trunks—appear larger than the people and trees around them. Moreover, the women dancing at lower right and the couple chatting at lower left are slightly tilted outwards, while the trees at upper right and left are titled inwards, creating a distorted curvilinear perspective, akin to a fisheye effect. This avant-garde configuration, coupled with the painting’s wild colors and brushwork, heighten the festive and frenzied nature of the painting’s subject, rooting it in a joyous sense of celebration.