Raoul Dufy - Nature morte au poulet et à la cafetière rouge - image-1

Lot 289 N

Raoul Dufy - Nature morte au poulet et à la cafetière rouge

Auction 1121 - overview Cologne
30.11.2018, 17:00 - Modern Art
Estimate: 15.000 € - 20.000 €

Raoul Dufy

Nature morte au poulet et à la cafetière rouge
Circa 1919

Gouache and watercolour on laid paper 51 x 66 cm Framed under glass. Signed 'Raoul Dufy' in pencil below the depiction lower left of the centre. - The sheet slightly wavy. Browning along the lower and left margins and with a narrow light-stain. - Handwritten inscription "Abels Cologne" in black ink verso on a paper label with a french stamp.

The artist's stays in Vence during the years after World War I initiated a new, altered style of painting. Following a clear break, from 1919 fluid transparency, luminous tonalities and a new freedom in composition and in the decorative characterisation of details typify his work. In terms of colour composition, Raoul Dufy liked to add striking accents of red to tones of blue and yellow. The present large-format, still-life sketch of a simple meal contrasts the close-up view of a fried chicken on a blue-and-white plate with a cafetière that dominates the composition with its intense red. The curves of this object are formally complemented by the decidedly circular forms of the plate as well as the cup and saucer at the upper edge of the picture and also by the soft-edged, painterly sweeps of the brush with which the composition fades out towards the bottom. Here smaller objects like the cutlery or spice bowls are merely suggested. The empty areas of the sheet are filled with bold and painterly brushed hatching; hints of three-dimensionality result from the effect of the colours and the hovering, elevated viewpoint.
Dufy had already depicted this motif in a pen-and-wash drawing from around 1919 (see Guillon-Lafaille 1404 “Nature morte au poulet et à la cafetière”). In a handful of other works from that time, he augmented still lifes featuring fruits and various glass vessels by adding the striking and bold colours and forms of coffee and tea pots.

Catalogue Raisonné

Not recorded by Guillon-Laffaille

Certificate

We would like to thank Fanny Guillon-Lafffaille, Paris, for friendly, complementary information. The work is documented and will be included in the forthcoming supplementary issue of the "Catalogue raisonné des aquarelles, gouaches et pastels" by Raoul Dufy.

Provenance

Collection René Drouet, Paris; Parke-Bernet Galleries Inc., Modern Paintings, 14th Annual Art Auction of the United Jewish Appeal, New York, 12 June 1967, lot 54 with illus.;Twentieth Century Art, 2 July 1998, lot 134 with colour illus.; Klaus J. Jacobs Collection, Zurich

Exhibitions

Possibly Galerie Abels, Cologne (paper label verso); Berlin/Stuttgart 1956 (Institut Francais Berlin/ Württembergischer Kunstverein), Raoul Dufy, probably each cat. no. 58 ("Stilleben mit Kaffekanne 1919")