Le théâtre antique de Taormina

What Dufy painted no other artist could have rendered, because no other possessed his gift for receiving and reflecting sensations of pleasure, light, and joy… His fine talent as a painter, his masterly use of smooth, brilliant, shining paint, so light and transparent, shows how perfectly his technique suited his artistic feeling’ (M. Brion, Raoul Dufy: Paintings and Watercolours, London, 1958, p. 6).
Painted in 1923, during the artist’s journey to Sicily, the present work depicts the Greek theatre in Taormina. Inspired by the Mediterranean landscape, attracted by the ancient and modern buildings bathed in light, Dufy brought new life to the ruins of the Greek theatre at Taormina where he was to meet up with Pierre Courthion.
Executed with dynamic and cheerful brushstrokes, Le théâtre antique de Taormina glorifies the beauty and nobility of Sicily. The surface of the mountains and texture of the clouds are animated within the vital breadth of mark-making inherent in the artist's masterful technique with the influence of Fauvism readily seen in both the intensity of colour and in the loose application of the paint.
For Dufy, Sicily’s main attraction was the light. ‘In Taormina […] the air, touched by a fiery light, throbbed between the columns of the Greek theatre, above the overhanging rocks, from which the eye plunges into the sea spread out below…[Dufy] had taken up his position on the terraces, in the ruins of the Greek theatre, painting its columns. (Pierre Courthion quoted in D. Perez-Tibi, Dufy, London, 1989, p. 136).