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  • Raoul Dufy
    Jun 3, 1877 - Mar 23, 1953
  • The Fleet in Villefranche - Raoul Dufy was a French artist and designer whose paintings and prints portrayed leisure activities and urban landscapes. His distinctive style is characterized by bright colours thinly spread over a white ground, with objects sketchily delineated by sensuously undulating lines. Dufy took as his subjects scenes of recreation and spectacle, including horse races, regattas, parades, and concerts.
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The Fleet in Villefranche
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  • The Fleet in Villefranche

  • Raoul Dufy
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  • La flotte à Villefranche, circa 1926
    Oil on canvas
    25 5/8 x 31 7/8 in. (65.1 x 80.9 cm.)

    In 1919, Dufy made his first extended visit to the Alpes-Maritimes region in the South of France. The Mediterranean sun and lush vegetation made an immediate impression upon him. He began to incorporate broad bright color with calligraphic line, developing what was to become his trademark style. As Grace L. McCann Morley writes, "It was in the twenties that Dufy adopted the peculiar conventions of color characteristic of so many of his oils and watercolors for two decades. The arrangement of bands of color to establish a composition... and application of color independent of forms and their contours became the rule. The result is an abstract color composition which exists and functions on its own terms...the result of his long research in color as the expression of light. Like the local colors that spill over the outline of the forms, they have the effect of suggesting movement" (Raoul Dufy, exh. cat., San Francisco Museum of Art, 1954, p. 18).

    In the present work, bands of varying shades of rich blues comprise the sprawling port of Villefranche-sur-Mer, where the visiting fleet of the world’s navies would often dock. Thick lines of purple paint form the boardwalk, where a well-dressed couple on a stroll watches as sailors unload onto land. Various types of boats populate the vast Mediterranean Sea. Here Dufy, the devoted colorist, has brilliantly captured the intensity of the light and colors in the South of France.
    La flotte à Villefranche was previously in the collection of The Museum of Modern Art in New York, and was thereafter acquired by the preeminent musician, Werner Eric Josten and his wife Margaret. Maestro Josten began a distinguished teaching career at Smith College in 1923, a post he held until 1949, the year he and his wife moved to Manhattan. It was during the ensuing decade and a half that the Jostens began amassing an extraordinary collection of European art from the late 19th through mid-20th century, which adorned the walls of their Fifth Avenue apartment. Although much of the collection was dispersed in the mid-1970s, many works were passed on to their children, Peter Josten and Eileen Josten Lowe. Eileen Josten Lowe followed in her parents’ footsteps; she and her husband Dr. Charles Lowe, began collecting contemporary art of the 1950s. Theirs was an eclectic but harmonious collection, which favored color and texture, and celebrated an exuberance and deep love of art.

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Other paintings by Raoul Dufy:

Regattas in Deauville 1936
Regattas in Deauville 1936
Jockeys and Horses before the Start
Jockeys and Horses before the Start
The Reservoir in Golfe-Juan, at the Bird
The Reservoir in Golfe-Juan, at the Bird
Little Bather in Sainte-Adresse
Little Bather in Sainte-Adresse
Raoul DufyRaoul Dufy was a French artist and designer whose paintings and prints portrayed leisure activities and urban landscapes. He created airy washes of light and shade, into which he would draw bold calligraphic brushstrokes. The artist's experimental use of color was influenced both by Claude Monet and his Fauvist peer Henri Matisse. “Blue is the only color which maintains its own character in all its tones it will always stay blue,” the artist mused. “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 color—pink.” Born June 3, 1877 in Le Havre, France, he enrolled in night classes at the École des Beaux-Arts before studying under Léon Bonnat at the École Nationale Supérieure des Beaux-Arts on a scholarship. Dufy first encountered Fauvism at the Salon des Indépendants in 1905, after which he adapted the style to serve his own artistic purposes. During his life, the artist traveled both abroad and within France, painting views of the Mediterranean city of Nice, as well as scenes of horse races and regattas. Throughout the 1920s, Dufy worked in a variety of materials, producing ceramics, tapestry hangings, and large-scale architectural decorations. His commission for the 26th Venice Biennale won him the International Grand Prix for painting in 1952, a year before his death on March 23, 1953 in Forcalquier, France. Today, the artist’s works are held in the collections of the Musée d’Orsay in Paris, the Hermitage Museum in St. Petersburg, The Museum of Modern Art in New York, and the Art Institute of Chicago.