Matisse’s shock, and Marquet at the next window

In 1905 Dufy was a competent young painter doing competent young paintings, soft and atmospheric in the leftover Impressionist manner. Then he walked into the Salon des Indépendants (the “Independents’ Salon,” a big open exhibition any artist could show in, no jury, no gatekeepers) and stood in front of a single canvas by Henri Matisse (1869–1954), the older painter who was becoming one of the boldest colorists in France. The picture was Luxe, calme et volupté (the title, “luxury, calm and pleasure,” comes from a Baudelaire poem), a beach scene built out of bright, unmixed, almost shadowless color. Dufy later described the encounter as a turning point, the moment he understood what painting could now do, and from that day his interests turned hard toward what would shortly be called Fauvism.

A word on that name, because we’re going to lean on it. Fauvism (pronounced “FOH-vism,” from the French fauve, “wild beast”) was the first big shock of twentieth-century painting, a brief, hot movement in which a loose band of painters around Matisse threw out the rule that color had to describe the real world. A tree could be red. A face could have a green stripe down it. Color came off the leash and became the whole point, laid on flat and pure and loud. A hostile critic, seeing a roomful of it at the 1905 autumn salon, sneered that the painters were fauves, wild beasts, and the insult stuck as the name. Matisse’s beach scene was the door Dufy walked through into all of that.

The conversion did not happen in a single afternoon; it matured over the next year, and it came to a head back home in the summer of 1906, when Dufy went to work the Normandy coast in the company of a friend and fellow Fauve, the painter Albert Marquet (pronounced “mar-KAY”; 1875–1947). The two of them set up shop together along the harbor, painting, by one account, side by side from the windows of hotel bedrooms: the basins, the open sea, the poster-plastered walls, and the city streets dressed in flags for the holiday. They were two painters chasing the same subjects out the same windows, and the flag-decked street was a motif they both seized that summer. Marquet painted his own version of the flagged Le Havre; Dufy painted ours. (If you ever meet Marquet’s 14th of July at Le Havre, that is the brother canvas, a separate painter’s separate take on the same festival.)

The holiday they were painting is the 14th of July, the French national day, the rough equivalent of the American Fourth of July, when the whole country hangs out the tricolor, the blue-white-red flag of the French Republic. A French town on the 14th of July strings flags across its streets and down its façades until you can barely see the buildings for the bunting. For a Fauve painter, that is not a backdrop. That is a gift: a whole street pre-loaded with patches of pure red, white and blue, the holiday itself doing the color work. Dufy did not have to invent a reason to paint flat planes of unmixed primary color. His hometown handed him a street full of them, one day a year, for free.