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Les assurances priv‚es signed 'Raoul Dufy' (lower left) oil on canvas laid down on canvas 223 x 661/2 in. (566.4 x 169 cm.) Painted circa 1937 PROVENANCE Les Arts Plastique Moderne, Paris. NOTES Fanny Guillon-Laffaille has confirmed the authenticity of this painting. Raoul Dufy's oeuvre is famous for colorful, picturesque, playful views of city streets, beaches, horse races, ports and studios. He assembles many of these favored images in Les assurances priv‚es (the boat, the train, the couple) and arranges them within the composition in a deliberately na‹ve, childish style. "Dufy's characteristic use of a compact, tersely eloquent calligraphy and pure, clean, unfussed, fast-flowing line is perhaps the most radical extension in the first half of the twentieth century of Van Gogh's passionately forceful and explosive handling of line and color in his own later paintings...The second but really co-existent factor in Dufy's art is obviously color, most unconstrained by tonality" (B. Robertson, Raoul Dufy, exh. cat., Hayward Gallery, London, 1983, p. 18). This system of painting became Dufy's "signature" style in the 1920s and he continued to work in this manner until the time of his death in 1953. His good friend Gertrude Stein described his artistic approach in the following terms: "think of Dufy, nobody calls him abstract but he is, he does not paint what he sees he paints what he is, and certainly it is not what anybody else sees...he abstracts the colors of which he is made and he puts them down in the light and shade of which he is made and his eyes have very little to do with it, except to work with...Dufy is pleasure. Think of the color and it is not that and the line and it is not that, but it is that which is all together and which is the color that is in Dufy when he sits in the sunshine, there it is in him, to be sure he has to have abstracted it out of him before you can see it in him, but I don't know perhaps one did even see it in him before he had completely abstracted it out of him" (quoted in ibid., p. 67). Dufy's experiments with tapestry and textiles earned him several commissions for murals and set designs. The large scale format of Les assurances priv‚es is suggestive of his work with scenery designs that he had first done with Gauconnet for Cocteau's Le boeuf sur le Toit in 1920 and, later, for Gilbert Miller's production of Ring Around the Moon and The New York City Ballet's production of A la Francaix in the early 1950s. It also recalls his mural decorations for the Palais de Chaillot theatre bar which he worked on between 1937-1940. In discussing Dufy's large-scale murals Antoinette Rez‚-Hur‚ notes: "It is the essentially rhetorical nature of large scale composition which must be appreciated: a number of figures or forms are designed, assembled, and then must be freely disposed to illustrate a point of convergence, a moment of communion, an idea fulfilled. This was Dufy's constant aim" ( ibid., p. 109). SALESROOM NOTICE Please note this work was painted circa 1937. Fanny Guillon-Laffaille has confirmed the authenticity of this painting.