The festival doing the Fauve’s work
Why does a small upright picture of a flagged street count for so much? Because of what it figured out about the relationship between a subject and its color, and it figured it out almost by luck, by being honest about a flag. Run the Fauve problem in your head for a second. The Fauve wanted to free color from its old job of describing the real look of things, to let red be red for its own sake and not because a tomato happens to be red. The trouble with that program is that it can feel arbitrary, a painter simply deciding to make a tree blue. Dufy found a subject where the freedom was not arbitrary at all, because the subject was already made of pure, flat, arbitrary color: a national flag, three stripes of unmixed pigment, hung frontally in the street.
That is why the museum that owns the picture singles out the one move at its center. By placing a French flag frontally, square to the canvas, Dufy “radically emphasizes the flatness of the picture surface.” A flag seen flat-on is a flat thing; paint it honestly and you have painted a flat patch of pure color, and once the flag is flat the whole street pressed behind it goes flat with it. The picture stops pretending to be a window you look through and admits it is a surface you look at, a thing made of paint, covered in shapes. The festival handed Dufy the cleanest possible argument for everything the Fauves were trying to say, and he had the wit to take the gift and add nothing.
Set it against the older way to see the size of the break. Monet’s flag-decked street of 1878, the obvious ancestor of this picture, used the same motif and the same holiday to chase one thing above all: a fleeting moment, the tricolors caught mid-flutter, color recording a passing instant of breeze and light. Dufy turns that purpose inside out. He uses the identical subject not to capture a moment but to build the space of the picture outright, the color, as the French study of the canvas puts it, “independent of the subject” and generating the space on its own. Same flags, opposite job. That is the move that points past Impressionism altogether, toward a painting that is frankly about its own flat colored surface, and a small flagged street in Le Havre is where Dufy made it, plainly, on a holiday afternoon.