"Les Baigneuses"

(1929)

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"Les Baigneuses", c.1925, lithograph, 350x510mm; 13 5/8" x 19 1/4", full margins. Signed by artist, lower right, numbered in pencil, lower left.  A very good, clean impression.

Raoul Dufy (1877-1953) was born in Le Havre studying there first and later at the Ecole des Beaux-Arts (1900) where he came under the influence of the Impressionists, specifically Van Gogh and Cezanne. In 1903, Dufy exhibited at the Salon des Independents.  By 1905, however, he converted to Fauvism, inspired by Matisse and Marquet. In 1906, he had his first one-man show. In 1908, Dufy began working with Braque at L'Estaque and in 1909 began altering his style in a Cezanne-like manner showing the beginnings of early Cubist tendencies.  It was at this time he began making woodcuts and by 1920, leaving a career as a commercial artist, he devoted himself entirely to painting, drawing and lithography.

In "Les Baigneuses", Dufy makes unmistakable reference to Cezanne's great masterpieces.  In this dramatic meeting of powerful human emotions, both pictorially and thematically, a sexual undercurrent is transferred to an idyllic natural setting of the mysterious and inaccessible female bather portrayed in the foreground in a dominant position; common in many of Dufy's gentle but ephemeral works.  There is a sense of virulent sexual energy, suggested by the nudes coiling upward motion, that suggests an impending invasion of this idyllic domain. The female in the foreground distances the observer through a gesture of ambivalence and rejection.

This Raoul Dufy is in 29 3/8" x 35 1/16" stacked frames. The outer frame is a classic half-rounded with beveled lip ebony frame and the inner is a wave pattern with a dusty wash. The outer midnight denim, middle ivory black beveled accent and inner hand-wrapped oatmeal linen mats are acid and lignin free and are protected with Acrylite-AR OP3 (UV) by CYRO..... SOLD