Street Decked with Flags

His home port’s street dressed for Bastille Day, where Dufy let a wall of tricolor flags do the radical work, flat patches of pure red, white and blue that flatten the whole street into pattern.

1. 1
   The tricolor that flattens the street

   Hung frontally near the center of the composition, a French flag parallel to the canvas

   This is the documented heart of the picture. By placing a French flag frontally at the center, the Pompidou catalogue says, Dufy “radically emphasizes the flatness of the picture surface.” It is a flat bar of pure blue, white and red, parallel to the canvas, that Dufy does not model in light and shade; he lets it sit as a flat patch. It is the festival’s own ready-made piece of pure color, and it does the most radical thing in the painting.
2. 2
   A street that is all flags

   The upper register, the flags strung and hung along the street

   The whole upper picture is the pavoisement, the act of dressing a street in flags for the national holiday. Run your eye up from the central tricolor and the buildings give way to a scatter of red, white and blue patches, flag after flag, that turns the top of the canvas into a confetti of pure color rather than a row of façades. The subject hands Dufy a whole street’s worth of unmixed color, already cut into shapes.
3. 3
   Green-and-pink houses in steep perspective

   The receding houses lining the street, behind and around the central flag

   Behind the tricolor the houses run back in green and pink (the colors the museum names) along a steep, raised perspective, the street tipping away from a high viewpoint. The cool greens and warm pinks of the buildings set off the foreground flag, so the whole picture is built as broad areas of flat, contrasting color, the houses as much a pattern as the flags.
4. 4
   The festival crowd below

   The lower street, beneath the flags

   Down under the flags is the holiday throng, handled as loose patches rather than drawn-out figures. The high, raised viewpoint, one source notes, “accentuates the animated character” of the scene, looking down onto the crowd from above. They are not portraits; they are the moving life of the festival, brushed in as color and motion.
5. 5
   Color making the space, not light

   Across the whole surface, the broad flat areas (aplats, broad flat zones of unmodulated color) of vivid color

   There is almost no Impressionist atmosphere here, no shimmer dissolving the edges. Instead, as the French study of the picture puts it, “color, independent of the subject, generates the space.” The street is built from flat areas of vivid color (aplats, broad flat zones of unmodulated color) laid side by side, each shape its own clean patch. Compare it to Monet’s flag streets, where the flags melt into atmosphere; Dufy’s stay as flat shapes you could cut out with scissors.
6. 6
   The high-key holiday palette

   Overall, the saturation across the entire canvas

   Take in the whole surface at once and the key is bright and festive: this is high key (the whole palette pitched bright and light, near full strength, with the darks kept out), vivid reds, blues, greens and pinks the opposite of muted Impressionist tone. The palette itself carries the celebration; the picture feels like a holiday before you have named a single object in it. This high, saturated chord is the festival’s mood made into paint.