IMAGE DETAILS

Willow Gallery

Raoul Dufy (Le Havre 1877-1953 Forcalquier)
Le Bal, 1920
Oil on canvas
55 x 65 cm - framed: 70 x 80 cm
Signed lower right 'Raoul Dufy'
Provenance: Galerie Bernheim-Jeune, Paris (in March 1924); Max Pellequer, Paris (acquired from the latter in January 1925); Marcel Kapferer, Paris (before 1928); Doctor Alexandre Rudinesco, Paris (before 1951); its sale, Parke-Bernett Galleries Inc., New York, October 10, 1968, lot 22 (titled 'Le Bal du quatorze Juillet à Antibes', dated '1910'); B. Gerald Cantor, New York (before 1970); private collection; private collection, France
Literature: C. Zervos, Raoul Dufy, Paris, 1928, n° 29 (ill.; titled 'Antibes'; dated '1921'); M. Gauthier, Raoul Dufy, Paris, 1949 (ill., pl. VIII; dated '1912'); P. Courthion, Raoul Dufy, Geneva, 1951, p. XII, n° 62 (ill., pl. 62; titled 'Le Bal à Antibes'; dated '1910'); M. Brion, Raoul Dufy, Paintings and Watercolors, London, 1958, pl. 13 (ill.: titled 'Ball at Antibes, 14 July'; dated '1910'); Maurice Laffaille, Raoul Dufy, Catalogue Raisonné de l’Oeuvre Peint, Tome IV, Editions Motte, Geneva, 1977, p. 147 n° 1581
Exhibitions: Paris, Galerie Charpentier, Plaisir de France, June 1951, n° 62 (titled 'July 14'); Paris, Galerie Charpentier, Plaisirs de la campagne, June 1954, n° 61 (titled 'July 14'); Albi, Toulouse-Lautrec Museum, Raoul Dufy Exhibition, Paintings, watercolors, drawings, tapestries, July-September 1955, p. 24, n° 11 (ill., pl. VIII; titled 'The Ball in Antibes, July 14'; dated '1910'); Paris, Galerie Bernheim-Jeune-Dauberville, Masterpieces of Raoul Dufy, For the benefit of mutual aid of intellectual workers, April-July 1959, n° 9 (ill., pl. 5; titled 'Antibes'; dated '1910'); Paris, Galerie Charpentier, Les Fauves, 1962, n° 55 (titled 'July 14'); Mexico, Museo Nacional de Arte Moderno, Cien años de pintura en Francia, De 1850 a nuestros dias, October-November 1962, p. 118, n° 47 (titled '14 de Julio'); Des Moines, Art Center; Indianapolis, Indianapolis Museum of Art; Albuquerque, University of New Mexico Art Museum; Santa Barbara, Santa Barbara Museum of Art and Fort Worth, Fort Worth Art Center Museum, Selections from the B. Gerald Cantor Collection, December 1970-August 1971, n° 4 (ill. in colour, titled 'Fourteenth of July Dance at Antibes'; dated '1910')

Born in 1877 in Le Havre, Dufy entered the Ecole Nationale des Beaux-Arts in Paris in 1900. During this period, he was heavily influenced by Impressionism. He exhibited his work for the first time at the 1901 Salon des Artistes, and then at the Salon des Indépendants in 1903. He also met Berthe Weill in 1902, and began to show his work in her gallery. Dufy received a boost to his confidence when the artist Maurice Denis was one of the first buyers of his work. For the next few years, Dufy painted in the vicinity of Le Havre, made famous by Eugène Boudin and Claude Monet.

In 1905 Dufy saw Matisse’s painting ‘Luxe, Calme et Volupté’ in the Salon des Indépendants and his work became influenced by the Fauves until about 1909 when exposure to the work of Paul Cézanne led him to adopt a more subtle technique. In 1911, he and the couturier Paul Poiret founded the ‘Petite Usine’, a company that printed fashion and decorative textiles. Initially interested in engraving, he then began to work in lithographs and watercolours before moving into ceramics alongside the Catalan artist Llorens Artigas. He also illustrated books.
After also showing interest in cubism, Dufy finally began to develop his own distinctive approach in 1920. Skeletal structures, foreshortened perspective, and thin, quickly-applied washes of colour became his trademark, in a manner he referred to as stenographic.

As subject matter, he chose yachting scenes, views of the French Riviera, parties, and musical events. He had also become fascinated with horseracing, which developed into one of his main subjects. Dufy initially focused on the fashionable racegoers, but soon also became fascinated by the racing itself. The colour and atmosphere of horseracing gave Dufy the opportunity to use and explore his ‘colour-light’ technique, which put the focus on using colour rather than black and white to imply light and shade. Throughout his career, the colour blue was a constant presence in his work. As he once remarked, ‘Blue is the only colour which maintains its own character in all its tones…it will always stay blue…whereas yellow is blackened in its shades and fades away when lightened: red when darkened becomes brown, and diluted with white is no longer red, but another colour – pink’. During this period, Dufy was prolific, working in a variety of materials producing ceramics, tapestry hangings, and large-scale architectural decorations.

Dufy’s success continued to grow, and in 1937 he (with the help of his brother Jean) was asked to create what was then the largest painting in the world for the Electricity Pavilion at the Universal Exhibition. ‘La Fée Electricité’ covers over 600 square meters, and was donated the Musée d’Art Moderne by Électricité de France and installed in 1964.

Despite the onset of rheumatoid arthritis, Dufy exhibited in the annual Salon des Tuileries during the late 1940s and early 1950s and was awarded the grand prize for painting at the 26th Venice Biennale in 1952, the year before his death.

Today, Dufy’s work is held in the collections of the Musée D’Orsay in Paris, the Hermitage Museum in St Petersburg, and the Museum of Modern Art in New York, and many others.

An explosion of colour with a dense yet carefully organized patchwork of lines and shapes convey the almost electric atmosphere of this festive dance scene painted by Raoul Dufy. Sometimes referred to as the 14th July, or the 14th July in Antibes, other times just as a dance or ball, Le Bal, is one of the most ambitious renderings of those two subjects combined into one that Dufy explored several times throughout his career. For example, Dufy painted a Bal Populaire in his Fauvist years in 1906, much less constructed and dominated by the green tones of the scene’s setting in park. In 1912, his interpretation of the 14th July festivities seems the closest in terms of composition to Le Bal, with its interlocked diagonals in the upper part – referring to the ball’s tent and flag garlands – and its animated dancing floor in the lower part rendered through spontaneous and vibrant brushstrokes suggesting the figures and their movements. In 1920, Raoul Dufy appears to have painted two very different dancing scenes, both titled Le Bal: the present work and another painting now in a private collection. Dufy opted for a setting in a park for the latter – closer to that of the 1906 painting – as opposed to setting the ball in a colourful almost circus-like tent, as seen in this example, recalling the painting of the 14th July (corresponding to ‘Bastille Day’, the national French public holiday marking the beginning of the French Revolution on 14 July 1789) dating from 1912. These similarities and differences with other works from Dufy’s oeuvre explain the ambiguity of the present work’s dating, given it was exhibited at Galerie Charpentier’s themed exhibition on Fauvism in 1962 and there dated ‘1908’. In other bibliographical references, it is often dated 1910, yet Fanny Guillon-Laffaille adamantly dated Le Bal of 1920 in the corresponding entry of her catalogue raisonné.

The daring colour code and combinations, and the broad brushstrokes barely defining the figures are reminiscent of his Fauvist years. The wide bands of colours covering more than half of the composition show Dufy’s awareness of the slightly later avant-gardist movements steering towards abstraction, such as Orphism.

Whether or not Le Bal depicts one of the traditional festivities of Bastille Day, and whether or not it is effectively set in Antibes, its vibrant composition is so full of life that it translates a sort of timelessness. Dufy presents us with a snapshot of modern life – it is colourful, dynamic and never stops – and there is no doubt that the 14th July was a perfect pretext to stage and glorify this exhilarating modern life. Judi Freeman wrote that Dufy ‘shared the Impressionist enthusiasm for the annual transformation of cities and towns for Bastille Day on July 14th and other flag-waving celebrations. Whereas Manet and Monet occasionally painted Parisian boulevards adorned with flags for patriotic holidays, Dufy and Marquet regularly depicted the festivities. For the Impressionist the flag-draped streets provided an opportunity to show a colorful festival of modern life, occasionally tinged with political overtones. For Dufy and Marquet the holiday provided motifs that could be situated within the Impressionist tradition but more loosely rendered, with the sketchier brushworks and scattered, almost random color ('The Distant Cousins in Normandy: Braque, Dufy and Friesz', in The Fauve Landscape, New York, 1990, p. 221-222).