Raoul Dufy [by or attrib] (French, 1877 - 1953). "L'Estaque/L'Arbre". Pastel on paper. 1908. Bears signature, lower left. Very good condition. Provenance: Ex-collection, Michel & Albert Garnaud, Cadenet, France; Private collection, Baltimore, Maryland. Dufy's major transition from Impressionism to his Fauve manner occurred in 1905-06, when he worked through another stylistic turning point in his career: his embrace of a cubist-inspired organization of space and volume. In 1908, Dufy joined Braque at L'Estaque, and the two painters rendered the local trees and hillsides in rigorously juxtaposed, simplified planes. The present work addresses Dufy's incorporation of cubist techniques into a distinctly personal style. In this work, what distinguishes Dufy from Braque and Picasso is that he preserves the recognizable character of his forms. Here he also displays the restricted palette of greens, blues, and ochres that he briefly adopted in 1908, later to apply instead intense Fauve colors to a system of staggered planes. His short, parallel brushstrokes lend a dynamic quality to the flat construction of geometrical forms, revealing his investigation of form and space in a Cézanne-inspired variation of the cubist style that was closely related to, yet always distinct from, mainstream Cubism. The strong lines of the present painting also reflect Dufy's preoccupation with woodcuts in 1907; the constructive brush strokes that characterize his landscapes of L'Estaque mirror his work with a penknife and gouge in relief engravings on wood. To him, these woodcuts represented the most complete expression of his new ideas on the interpenetration of planes. Image © Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York. Image size: 12 1/2 x 10 in. (317 x 254 mm). [25247] |4000| {R100}