.jpg?w=1)
拍品专文
Vibrantly illustrating the spectacle and drama of the card game, this jubilant work is representative of Dufy’s mature style in its vivid contrasts and sensually outlined figures. Dufy focused on painting in the 1920s following a period of creating woodcuts, textiles, tapestries and ceramics. His works of the 1920s and 1930s—such as the present work—are characterized by a tripartite divide of bands of color, divorced from the drawing made with the brush. As Grace L. McCann Morly has written, “application of color independent of forms and their contours became the rule. The result is an abstract color composition which exists and functions on its own terms…the local colors that spill over the outline of the forms…have the effect of suggesting movement” (quoted in exh. cat., op. cit, 1954, p. 18).
Baccara, indeed, is imbued with this sense of movement and a veritable cast of characters. A woman in a flowing dress holding a plate exits out the left of the picture as a handsomely dressed standing man looks over the table to the right. A chair turned outwards seems to welcome the viewer to the game, played at a round table populated by men and women decked out in their finest threads. Dufy’s heightening of his figures in white lends a magical atmosphere to the scene, emphasizing the immediacy of the moment in the game. Popularized in France in the 19th century by the noble class, baccarat was played in private rooms from the Napoleonic period until 1907, when gambling was legalized in France.
Baccara, indeed, is imbued with this sense of movement and a veritable cast of characters. A woman in a flowing dress holding a plate exits out the left of the picture as a handsomely dressed standing man looks over the table to the right. A chair turned outwards seems to welcome the viewer to the game, played at a round table populated by men and women decked out in their finest threads. Dufy’s heightening of his figures in white lends a magical atmosphere to the scene, emphasizing the immediacy of the moment in the game. Popularized in France in the 19th century by the noble class, baccarat was played in private rooms from the Napoleonic period until 1907, when gambling was legalized in France.