RAOUL DUFY (1877-1953) The Bay of Sainte-Adresse ... Lot 48

RAOUL DUFY (1877-1953) The Bay of Sainte-Adresse signed and dated "Raoul Dufy 1906" (lower right) oil on canvas painted in 1906 signed and dated 'Raoul Dufy 1906' (lower right) oil on canvas painted in 1906 65 x 81.3 cm (25 9/16 x 32 in) Footnotes: 拉乌尔-杜菲(1877-1953) 圣阿德雷斯海岸 油画，画于1906年 Provenance Maurice Denis Collection. Acquired from the artist at the 1906 Salon des Indépendants. Private collection, France. Sale, Paris, Poulain Le Fur. Exhibitions Paris, Grand Palais, Salon d'Automne, Société des Artistes Indépendants, 22nd exhibition, October - November 1906, no. 1574. Paris, Didier Imbert Fine Arts, Paris Capitale des Arts, April 28 - July 14, 1989, lot 4, ill. Paris, Didier Imbert Fine Art, 20 ans de Passion Alain Delon, Peintures, 1990, no. 26, ill. Los Angeles, Metropolitan, Royal Academy, The Fauve Landscape, October 4 - December 30 1991, lot 5, ill. Paris, Musée d'Art Moderne de la Ville de Paris, Passions privées, December 18, 1995 - March 24, 1996. Lyon, Musée des Beaux arts - Musée de l'imprimerie, Raoul Dufy , January 28 - April 18, 1999, no. 20, ill. Barcelona, Museu Picasso - Museu Tèxtil i d'Indumentària, Raoul Dufy , April 29 - July 11, 1999, no. 20, ill. Paris, Musée d'Art Moderne de la ville de Paris, Raoul Dufy, Le Plaisir, 2008 - 2009, no. 9, ill. Before discovering Matisse's masterpiece Luxe, calme et volupté at the 1905 Salon des Indépendants, Dufy had worked in an Impressionist style, already familiar with the Divisionist technique used, having seen Signac's major exhibition at the Galerie Druet in December 1904. Rendered in a mosaic of pure pigments and freed from all descriptive representation, it was Matisse's astonishing use of color, rather than the neo-Impressionist technique, that struck Dufy most profoundly and subsequently revolutionized his style. Twenty years later, Dufy acknowledged this debt to Matisse and the catalytic effect on his painting: "All the new reasons for painting, and Impressionist realism lost all their charm for me, when I contemplated the miracle of the imagination that had penetrated both line and color. I immediately understood the mechanism of the new painting" (D. Perez-Tibi, ibid, p. 19). By 1905, Dufy had returned to his hometown for a short period after several years in Paris. Gifted with prodigious talent from an early age, he enrolled at a local art school at the age of fifteen, but soon won a municipal scholarship to study at the École des Beaux-Arts in Paris. However, Dufy resisted the academic training he received there and, in 1903, decided to exhibit for the first time at the avant-garde Salon des Indépendants, working mainly in a style derived from the Impressionists until 1904. Belonging to the generation that followed Eugène Boudin and Claude Monet, Raoul Dufy was part of a group of artists from Le Havre that emerged in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, including Othon Friesz and Georges Braque. The year 1905, and in particular the transformative experience of Matisse's Arcadian landscape, provoked a decisive change in Dufy's painting. While returning to familiar motifs such as the harbors and coastal regions of his childhood, Dufy also rendered his favorite subjects with an invigorated palette and a newly modernist treatment of form: "Around 1905-1906, I was painting on the beach at Sainte-Adresse, I had already painted beaches in the manner of the Impressionists, I had reached saturation and I realized that this method of copying nature was leading me towards the infinite, with its twists and turns, its most subtle and fleeting details. I found myself outside the picture. Arriving at one beach subject or another, I'd sit down and start looking at my paint tubes and brushes. How, with these things, could I succeed in conveying not what I see, but what is, what exists for me, my reality? That's the whole problem [...] So I began to draw, choosing the nature that suited me [...] From that day on, I could no longer return to my sterile struggles with the elements visible to my gaze. It was no longer possible to show them in their external form" (D. Perez-Tibi, ibid, pp. 22-23). Speaking later to art historian and critic Pierre Courthion, Dufy recalled the source of the main leitmotifs that appear throughout his work: "My youth was lulled by music and the sea" (D. Perez-Tibi, ibid, p. 12). Again imbued with this memory, Dufy depicts the northern dike with intense vitality, and this joyful, animated scene has Sainte Adresse. He makes no attempt to imitate this vision and, above all, this light, which he struggles to reproduce. At this time, he was fully embracing and experimenting with the precepts of Fauvism.