Lot 63 D

Under the influence of Cézanne's artworks and through his work together with Georges Braque, Raoul Dufy turned to Cubism around 1908. The luminous tonality of his previous fauvist works was replaced by a more reserved colour scheme. Formal and constructive questions entered into the foreground. In 1909 Dufy travelled to Munich with Émile-Othon Friesz, a friend from his studies, and their stay left its mark on the oeuvres of both painters in the form of multiple pictures. While Friesz concentrated on views of Munich's snow-covered squares, Dufy created views of streets and parks which link individual buildings with the vegetation surrounding them and sometimes also with strolling passers-by. The formal contrast between the block-like, cubic buildings in the middle ground or background and the bare, winterly trees placed in the foreground is interesting. The latter are reduced to a feather-like form in the manner of a symbol and Dufy seems to have seen them not as staffage subordinate to the motif, but as equal to the buildings in terms of significance (see, for example, “La Garde à Munich”, Laffaille 292, or “Paysage de Munich”, Laffaille 295).
The title of our work, “Jardin à Munich” immediately calls Munich's English Garden to mind, but a location in the Botanical Garden would also be plausible. In this spring-like landscape image, the viewer's gaze is directed over a little wooded area from an elevated vantage point. Shapes in brown and green summarily depict the trees, and the individual lines of trunks and branches as well as the elliptical outlines of the tree's crowns stand out. A kind of palm-tree form can even be recognised to the left of the picture. The monolithic block of the building stretching above the trees, which is windowless and features a flattened bluish roof as well as the suggestion of a balustrade, cannot be definitively identified. Dufy has combined the soft, painterly treatment of the colour with a precise, geometric construction by causing the group of trees to converge towards the building placed above them at the centre, thus producing a pyramidal form.