JEAN DUFY (1888-1964) Lot n° 20

JEAN DUFY (1888-1964) La Haye-Descartes, la papeterie bords de la Creuse, 1930 Oil on canvas Signed lower right Titled on the reverse Oil on canvas; signed lower right; titled on the reverse 60 X 73 CM - 23 5/8 X 28 3/4 IN. PROVENANCE Me Blache, 12 June 1985, lot 137 Acquired at this sale by the present owner BIBLIOGRAPHY Jacques Bailly, Catalogue raisonné de l'œuvre de Jean Dufy (1888-1964), Paris, 2002, Vol. II, reproduced in black and white under no. 838, p. 136 RELATED WORK Jean Dufy (1888-1964), The Eiffel Tower, ca. 1924-1925, oil on canvas, 60 x 73 CM, private collection When Jean Dufy's image remains the transcriber of electric atmospheres, by his music hall and circus scenes, representing the crowd and the movement by its bright colors, La Haye-Descartes the paper mill of Creuse, offers us a moment of calm and introspection, in a rowdy work. Although we find the typical cutting of the space in checkerboards of colors, here, the flat tints do not echo an artificial lighting of ball, but bend well to a certain realism. With their predominantly ochre and blue chromatics, without human presence, some of Jean Dufy's landscapes are drastically different from the whole of his production, and perhaps also, unconsciously, from that of his elder, Raoul Dufy. And it is probably not insignificant if this new facet of the artist is revealed when he is in a territory untouched by the imprint of his brother. Indeed, this harmony of strong and complementary tones of browns, azure and dark reds can be found mainly in the landscapes of Touraine and the Vosges, where Jean sailed and then lived, moving away from the festive Paris and the golden South that belong to Raoul. During his thirties, Jean Dufy followed a Cézanne approach, with his work of crosshatching and profiles of houses reduced to falsely schematic cubes, starting in 1919 with the Val-d'Ajol (Eskenazi Museum of Art collection, Indiana University). Some still lifes from the 1920s show the mastery of the illusion of perspective truncated by the juxtaposition of colors that play on the surface. Only a few of the artist's notes have come down to us, and they reveal his adoration for the master Henri Matisse. It is therefore quite natural that, from this Fauvist penchant, an elaboration of the tints gives a result close to the landscapes of Maurice de Vlaminck, another emulator of the movement. It was during this period that our painting was executed, revealing a renewed brush stroke by Jean Dufy, and a peaceful representation of the haven of peace he would choose as his place of residence between 1934 and 1939. This bucolic parenthesis is all the more a balance to his frenetic activity, the year of execution of our painting being the same as that of Dufy's conquest of the Americas, with his first exhibition in New York.