A street that is all pure color

The painting is small and upright, about two feet eight inches tall by two feet one and a half wide, taller than it is wide, the size of a smallish window, which is fitting, because it more or less is one. It is portrait orientation, and that matters: a street seen down its own length, the buildings closing in on either side, is naturally a tall, narrow view, and Dufy uses the upright shape to send the street climbing up the canvas away from you. Stand back from it before you read a single object and the first thing that hits you is not a street at all. It is a wall of color: bright reds and blues and whites and greens and pinks, loud and flat and festive, more like a hung carpet or a scatter of confetti than a picture of a place. The holiday is in the painting before you have found anything in it.

Now let your eye settle on the middle of the picture, because that is where Dufy put the most radical thing in it: a French flag, hung frontally near the center, facing you square, parallel to the surface of the canvas. This is the heart of the whole painting, and it is worth slowing down for. Most painters, handed a flag, would let it ripple and twist and catch the light, modelling it round in light and shade (shading a flat shape so it looks round and solid) so it sits in real space, a cloth object hanging in air. Dufy refuses. He paints it as what it physically is at this angle: a flat bar of pure blue, white and red, three clean stripes, lying on the canvas like a label stuck to the glass. He does not round it. He does not shade it. He lets it be flat. And because he lets that one flag be flat, the whole street behind it goes flat too, pressed up against the surface like a poster. The museum that owns the picture makes exactly this point: by placing the flag frontally at the center, Dufy “radically emphasizes the flatness of the picture surface.” One hung flag, and the depth of the world drains out of the painting on purpose.

Think about what the holiday has handed him here. A flag is already an abstract design, three blocks of pure color in a fixed pattern, made by somebody else, hung up by somebody else, before the painter ever arrives. Dufy doesn’t have to invent his patch of flat color; he just has to be honest about the one already hanging in the street. The subject is alreadyabstract. The 14th of July did the Fauve’s job for him, and he was clever enough to leave it alone.

Now follow the street upward from that central flag, and watch the whole top of the picture come apart into color. The pavoisement, the dressing of the street in flags, runs the length of the view, flag after flag strung and hung along the way, so that the upper register of the canvas stops being a row of buildings and becomes a cascade of red, white and blue patches strung up the receding street, climbing back and away from you toward the top of the canvas. You read it less as cloth than as confetti, a shower of pure-color shapes, each one a clean little block that Dufy has refused to soften or round or sink into shadow. It is the same flatness as the central flag, multiplied up the street, until the top of the picture is a field of bright patches with the festival rattling through it.

Behind and around the flags, the houses line the street and run back into the distance in a steep, raised perspective, the view tipping down on the scene from somewhere high up. And here Dufy keeps coloring against nature, because the houses are not house-colored. They are green and pink, cool green and warm pink set side by side, the colors the museum itself names in describing the picture. The greens and pinks of the buildings push against the red, white and blue of the flags, so that the whole canvas is organized as broad areas of flat, contrasting color, the architecture as much a pattern as the bunting. Down below, in the lower part of the street under all that flagging, is the festival crowd, the holiday throng. Look for it as a band of small dark and light dabs massed across the base of the street, packed between the buildings where the perspective gathers, not drawn-out figures but loose patches of life. The high viewpoint, looking down onto the crowd, “accentuates the animated character” of the scene, as one study of the picture puts it: you are above the festival, watching it move.

Pull back one more time and notice what is missing. There is almost no atmosphere in the painting, none of the soft Impressionist haze where edges dissolve and a street melts into light and air. That was the older way, the way Dufy himself had painted a year or two before, and the way Claude Monet (1840–1926), the great Impressionist, had painted his own famous flag-decked Paris streets back in 1878, the festival flags shimmering and breaking up into dabs of bright weather. Dufy had clearly looked hard at Monet’s flag streets; this picture is partly an answer to them. But where Monet lets the flags melt into atmosphere, Dufy holds them as flat shapes you could cut out with scissors. The study of the picture by the French national museums puts the difference in one line: here, “color, independent of the subject, generates the space.” That is the whole modern move in a sentence. The space in this painting is not made by light and shadow and distance. It is made by where Dufy puts which patch of which color. Color is no longer describing the street. Color is the street.

And the key the color is pitched in is the last thing to take in: a high, festive register, vivid reds, blues, greens and pinks at close to full strength, the opposite of muted Impressionist tone. Painters call this high key, meaning the whole palette pitched bright and light-filled, near full strength, with the darks kept out, and high key is exactly what carries the celebration. You can feel the holiday in the painting before you have named a single object in it, because the brightness is doing the talking. That is a Fauve picture: a street remade as a chord of pure, loud, flat color, struck once, on a summer holiday, in a port town that happened to have raised the painter who could hear it.