“Au Cirque”

Medium	Gouache on paper
Signed	Signed lower right & dated
Size	9.00" × 6.00" (22.9cm × 15.2cm)
Framed Size	17.00" × 14.00" (43.2cm × 35.6cm)
Dated	1958
Condition	Very good condition
Provenance	This work was gifted to a friend of Jean Dufy on the occasion of Christmas 1958

Summary

The circus was one of Jean Dufy's most sustained and personal subjects, and it is easy to see why. The big top offered everything his palette and sensibility responded to most deeply — artificial light falling on white, the electric contrast of costume and shadow, colour used as pure sensation rather than description, movement frozen at its most theatrical moment. In Au Cirque he is entirely in his element. The handling is characteristic: fluid, rhythmic lines that suggest rather than define, colour applied in washes that give the canvas its particular luminosity, and that signature deployment of white — for the clowns, for the horses, for the performers — that catches the light and gives the whole composition its shimmer. There is nothing laboured about it. The marks are made quickly and with complete assurance, as if the scene has been absorbed so many times that the painting is a memory as much as an observation. Jean Dufy (1888–1964) was born in Le Havre, the younger brother of the more celebrated Raoul. He moved to Paris after military service and was welcomed into a circle that included Braque, Picasso, Derain and Apollinaire. His neighbour for many years was Georges Braque, whose influence shaped his early development. It was the energy of postwar Paris — the jazz clubs, the music halls, the circuses, the racecourses — that gave his mature work its subject matter and its mood. His work is held in the Musée National d'Art Moderne at the Centre Pompidou in Paris, the Museum of Modern Art in New York and the Albertina in Vienna. A three-volume catalogue raisonné of his work has been published by Galerie Jacques Bailly in Paris, completing the scholarly record of an artist whose importance to twentieth-century French painting continues to be reappraised.

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