Raoul Dufy

Dr. Alexandre Roudinesco, Paris (commissioned from the artist)
Sale: Parke Bernet New York, 10 October 1968, lot 67
Evelyn Sharp, New York (acquired from the above sale)
Sale: Sotheby’s New York, 12 November 1997, lot 19
Private collection (acquired from the above sale)

M. Brion, Raoul Dufy: Paintings and Watercolors, London, 1958, p. 111, no. 57 (illustrated)
M. Lafaille, Raoul Dufy: Catalogue raisonné de l’oeuvre peint, vol. IV, Geneva, 1977, p. 150, no. 1585 (illustrated)

Basel, Kunsthalle, Vlaminck, R. Dufy, Rouault, 1938, no. 76
Paris, Galerie Charpentier, Chevaux et cavaliers, 1948, no. 53
Paris, Musée national d’art moderne, Raoul Dufy, 1953, no. 72, pl. XX (illustrated)
London, The Tate Gallery, Raoul Dufy, 1954, no. 68 
Paris, Galerie Bernheim-Jeune-Dauberville, Chefs d’oeuvre de Raoul Dufy, 1959, no. 31, fig. 13 (illustrated)
New York, The Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, The Evelyn Sharp Collection, 1978, p. 43, no. 19 (illustrated in colour)

The circus was a critical theme in the work of artists belonging to the School of Paris circle. At the turn of the twentieth century, the Cirque Médrano had become a hub for artists such as van Dongen, Picasso, and Dufy, as the movement and colours of the spectacle made for a prime opportunity to study human form. In the present work, Raoul Dufy daringly chose to depict the circus ring in swathes of ochre pigment. He tips the viewer’s perspective to an almost birds-eye-view, turning the lower register of the canvas into a study of pure colour that served as a percussor to many works produced by Post-War artists such as Josef Albers decades later.

The artist’s theory of ‘couleur-lumière’ cemented his standing as a key figure in the Fauvist movement. Dufy spoke frequently of this chromatic breakthrough, reflecting that “I was spontaneously led towards what was to become my real preoccupation. I had discovered a system, whose theory was this: to follow the light of the sun is a waste of time. Light in painting is something completely different: it is a light distributed throughout the composition, a ‘couleur-lumière’” (Dufy quoted in Dora Perez-Tibi, Dufy, New York 1989, pp. 23-24). While his Fauve period was only a brief moment in Dufy's career, he retained and sincerely embodied what it taught him about colour and simplicity.

The present work was commissioned directly from the artist by paediatrician and collector Alexandre Roudinesco, in whose collection it remained for 34 years. Roudinesco was an avid and early School of Paris collector who cultivated close friendships with its artists, particularly Dufy who described him as “an enthusiastic but very exacting client.” He was also a great supporter of Alexander Calder, who painted and made wire models of the dynamic circus performers in Paris. This culminated in the sculpture set Cirque Calder, now on view at the Whitney Museum of American Art, which Calder would use to put on hours-long puppet-style circus shows, complete with peanut snacks and noisemakers for the audience. Calder's 1926 gouache of the subject contains the same, intensely solid-coloured rings as Dufy's interpretation, with a similar anonymous body of frenzied onlookers.

In Roudinesco’s self-written introduction to the 1968 sale of his collection at Parke-Bernet Galleries, he detailed anecdotes about the days when the School of Paris artists were not in favour—Dufy was at one point paying for groceries with paintings—and gives advice to aspiring collectors: “In forming a contemporary collection one should consult art critics only infrequently, and what is more important, one should avoid listening to the artists themselves.”