“Montmartre – Vue de l’atelier de Jean Dufy”

This is one of the most ambitious compositions in Jean Dufy's output — a painting that collapses the boundary between interior and exterior, between the painter's own table and the rooftops of Paris beyond, into a single continuous world of colour and form. Books, an ashtray, a matchbox, a chair — the objects of a working studio — occupy the foreground, while behind them the zinc rooftops, chimneys, windows and facades of the city stretch away under a broken blue sky. The two spaces are not separated. They flow into each other, the diagonal lines of the roofs continuing the rhythms of the table top, the blue of the Paris sky bleeding into the blue of the shadows indoors. The palette is more complex and more demanding than in Dufy's harbour or racing subjects. This is not a painting of colour for its own sake but of colour doing structural work — the ochres and greens of the rooftops, the deep blue of the window frames, the warm reds and browns of the distant buildings, all held together by the confident grey of the foreground surface. The handling is freer than it looks: individual brushstrokes are rapid and sure, the paint applied without hesitation, the whole canvas resolved with the economy of a painter who knows exactly what he is doing and has no interest in labouring the point. Dated 1948 — the same year as the Honfleur harbour paintings — this canvas shows a different, more introspective Dufy: the painter alone in his studio, looking outward at the city he loved, making it his own in the only way that mattered to him. The authenticity of this work has been confirmed by Jacques Bailly, the leading authority on Jean Dufy's output, and it will be included in Volume III of the catalogue raisonné of his work — the definitive scholarly record. It comes from the collection of Richard H. Zinser, a distinguished American collector of French modern art. Jean Dufy (1888–1964) was born in Le Havre and spent his career in Paris among a circle that included Braque, Picasso and Apollinaire. 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.