Human Interest
Painting of Star #706 in 1933 by Dufy
By Melinda Berge, LOG Editor & webmaster
May 5, 2005, 13:22

RÉGATES À DEAUVILLE

Offered at auction by Sotheby's in New York on May 4, 2005 was a painting of sailboats at Deauville, France done in 1933 by Raoul Dufy. In the painting is Star #706. The painting sold for $US352,000.

The 1933 Log shows that Star # 706 was owned by H. la Carpentier and Chesneau of the Seine Maritime fleet. The boat's name was Emeraude II. H. le Carpentier was the SM fleet captain for 1933. He came in third in the 1932 fleet championship, out of 19 boats.

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Raoul Dufy

Raoul Dufy was one of the most popular artists of the first half of the twentieth century. He was born at Le Havre, France in 1877 into a modest family. He went to work early on but took drawing courses in the evening at the municipal Beaux-Arts in his hometown. In 1900, Dufy received a local grant enabling him to attend the École des Beaux-Arts in Paris where he became a pupil of Leon Bonnat. He was strongly influenced by an exhibition in 1905 in which 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 used color as an exuberant means 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.

Dufy, who had received a traditional art training previously, was decisively affected by his encounter with the Fauves. Shortly after visiting the Salon d’Automne, Dufy started painting in the Fauvist style. His favourite subjects were regattas, casinos and palm trees, race courses and orchestras, but his representations of the southern towns of Avila and Caltagirone have equal charm. Alongside his career as a painter, he also worked as an illustrator (Apollinaire's Bestiaire), fabric designer (for Paul Poiret) and decorator (the Fée Électricité for the Palais de la Lumière at the Exposition Universelle in 1937).

Dufy’s position in the artistic world was established by the mid 1920s. He had many international exhibitions and awards followed; capped by receiving the International Grand Prize for Painting at the Venice Biennale in 1952; many retrospective exhibitions of his work came after his death in 1953.

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Thanks to Arie van Harwegen den Breems for discovering this painting in the auction.


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