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Artist or Maker: Raoul Dufy (1877-1953)
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Provenance: Mme Danièle Drouant-Lacombe, Paris.
Galerie Daniel Malingue, Paris.
Anonymous sale, Christie's, London, 21 June 1993, lot 30.
Acquired at the above sale by the present owner.
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Exhibited: Warsaw, National Museum of Poland, Maîtres de l'art indépendants , February - March 1937, no. 54.
Geneva, Musée d'Art et d'Histoire, Raoul Dufy , June - September 1952 (illustrated).
Paris, Galerie Bernheim Jeune-Dauberville, Chefs-d'oeuvre de Raoul Dufy , April - July 1959, no. 25.
Paris, Galerie Europe, Hommage à Raoul Dufy , May - June 1967, no. 12.
Tokyo, Palais France, Galerie Drouant, Raoul Dufy , March - April 1974, no. 14 (illustrated).
London, Hayward Gallery, Raoul Dufy , November 1983 - February 1984, no. 97 (illustrated p. 48).
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Notes: THE PROPERTY OF A PRIVATE COLLECTOR
Fanny Guillon-Laffaille has confirmed the authenticity of this painting.
Executed in 1931, La Martiniquaise was painted in Dufy's studio in the Impasse de Guélma in Montmartre, 'to which Dufy moved in 1911 and which he was to keep until his death despite his extended absences. He had the walls painted blue, the blue which was to become his dominant colour and which he was to introduce into his painting in innumerable variations. It was to this studio, immortalized in numerous compositions, that he liked to return after his travels, to develop a work that had long been maturing in his experiments and discoveries' (D. Perez-Tibi, Raoul Dufy , London, 1989, p. 242).
Dufy's studio was filled with opulent fabrics and intense colours, and served as the backdrop for a number of joyous works painted between 1928 and 1932, in which Dufy reaffirms his passion for colour and his delight in depicting the female form. 'Huddled in crumpled draperies, reclining like an odalisque, standing in the middle of the studio or seated on a stool, the nude model of the thirties portrays a single type of woman. Her unprepossessing lines and full forms with their relaxed muscles correspond to Dufy's taste for the arabesque. Her stocky torso, accentuated by the elevated perspective, is stressed by the raw and flat lighting of the studio. In Dufy's work, the model is created by colour; the light of the painting emanates from the model's flesh' ( ibid. ).
This period also marked a spectacular emergence of the nude in Dufy's oeuvre . This motif was a favourite theme of Dufy's and one in which he often use his preferred model Rossetti, depicting her reclining on drapery and emphasizing her rounded shape by enclosing her form in a heavy dark outline. Although La Martiniquaise is fully clothed, she has more in common with Dufy's striking nudes of this period than with the more formal portraits in plain surroundings he also executed during this period. For one thing she is unidentified (although she is likely to have been a Indian model called Anmaviti Pontry, who sometimes replaced Rossetti from the late 1920s) but it is in the vibrant, highly-keyed surroundings in which she is depicted that the work takes on its full resonance. Richly patterned and vibrantly coloured, the walls, carpets and fabrics that threaten to engulf the Martiniquaise are at once reminiscent of Dufy's own designs for Bianchini-Ferrier and of Matisse's highly decorated interior settings for his reclining odalisques .
Dora Perez-Tibi has written of the present work: 'While The Martinican Woman attests to Dufy's liking for a certain exoticism, she also contributes to a seductive and decorative composition. This combines the warmth of a range of colour stressing reds, pinks, ochres and yellows, punctuated with white and green, and an ornamental richness which does not weigh down the composition as a whole. The figure remains admirably in the foreground despite the flatness of this composition, counterbalanced by the oblique angles of the folds of the dress and her arms and feet, and by the faint hints of the bed. Dufy has painted the model in his bedroom, sitting on the edge of the bed, with a fabric bearing a Bianchini-Ferrier pattern of arum lilies draped over the walls of the room. Behind the model stands a canvas panel in intense colours, painted in Tournon in 1930 from an initial watercolour design' (D. Perez-Tibi, op. cit. , p. 244).
