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Raoul Dufy
France,
1877-1953
La Plage de Ste-Adresse, 1905
Oil on canvas
17 x 21 in.
The Aaron M. and Clara Weitzenhoffer Collection, 2000 |
In 1905, Henri Matisse, André Derain,
and Maurice de Vlaminck unleashed a riot of color at the Salon d’Automne,
Paris’s fall exhibition of contemporary art. Their paintings,
inspired by Van Gogh, Gauguin, and Signac, simplified design and
liberated color from its descriptive functions, using it instead
as an exuberant vehicle of expression and pictorial construction.
A critic described the artists as fauves ("wild beasts")
and the label stuck for this first modern art movement of the twentieth
century.
Raoul Dufy, who had received a traditional
art training in his native Le Havre and then in Paris, was immediately
and decisively affected by his encounter with the Fauves. In 1905,
shortly after visiting the Salon d’Automne, Dufy painted this
Fauvist work, which depicts Ste-Adresse, the beach at Le Havre.
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