The breakthrough he kept his whole life

Dufy’s Fauve moment was short. He ran hot with pure flat color for only a few years, roughly 1905 to 1909, and then contact with the work of Paul Cézanne (1839–1906), the painter who built his pictures out of solid, weighed-up structure, pulled him a different way, toward a subtler, more constructed handling. He flirted briefly with Cubism (the movement that broke objects into faceted planes), and then, from about 1920, he settled into the light, quick, decorative style that actually made him famous: thin washes of bright color floating over a skeletal pen drawing, regattas and racecourses and the Riviera, the manner most people picture when they hear the name Dufy. The same flat-pattern instinct carried him into textile design, where for years he made printed-fabric patterns for the Lyon silk house Bianchini-Férier, and into enormous decorative commissions, most spectacularly a huge mural about electricity, La Fée Électricité, in 1937.

So La Rue pavoisée catches him at a white heat he soon left behind, one of the high points of a phase that lasted only a handful of years. And he seems to have known it. The Pompidou calls this version the most innovative of his flag streets, the flat tricolor foreground set against the green-and-pink perspective of the houses, and there is a quiet piece of evidence that Dufy agreed: he never sold it. He kept this canvas, by the museum’s own phrase, “his whole life.” A painter keeps a picture for many reasons, but a painter keeps thisone, the breakthrough, the day the festival showed him what color could do, the way you keep the thing you can’t make twice.

The painting’s life as an object, its provenance (the documented chain of who has owned a work, from the painter’s hand to wherever it hangs now), is about as short and clean as a famous picture’s can be, precisely because it never went to market. Dufy painted it in Le Havre for the 14th of July, 1906, and held it himself until he died on 23 March 1953. It passed to his widow, Émilienne Dufy (in the records, “Mme Raoul Dufy”), who kept it for another decade. Then, in 1963, she gave it to the French state: a bequest (a gift made by will or donation) to the Musée national d’art moderne, the national museum of modern art in Paris, now housed at the Centre Pompidou. There it has stayed, catalogued as AM 4113 P, on permanent view. Three owners in all, and two of them were Dufy and his wife. The canvas went straight from the painter who couldn’t part with it to the country he painted it in.

It is worth holding the dates straight, because Dufy painted several flag-decked Le Havre scenes in these years and the world has shuffled them ever since. The one we have been looking at is the 1906 canvas in the Pompidou, the one he kept. It is not the later 14th-of-July Le Havre painting in New York, and not the one in Washington. This is the one a port painter made of his own port on its festival day, in the brief season when color came off the leash, and then carried with him for the rest of his life.