© 2022 Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York / ADAGP, Paris

Artist/Maker Raoul Dufy (French, 1877 – 1953)

The Brooklyn Bridge (Le Pont de Brooklyn)

1950

Watercolor and gouache on paper

Unframed: 9 7/8 × 13 in. (25.1 × 33 cm)
Framed: 18 1/4 × 21 in. (46.4 × 53.3 cm)

Promised gift of Elie and Sarah Hirschfeld, Scenes of New York City

IL2021.51.25

French artist Raoul Dufy, famous for depicting pleasurable events and sparkling views of the French Riviera, probably created this watercolor and the related preparatory drawing when he visited the United States in 1950 and painted a number of watercolors of New York and the Brooklyn Bridge. The artist was delighted by the architecture of New York City, which he termed “a resumé of the universe.” In April of that year, he underwent an experimental treatment for rheumatoid arthritis in Boston, which was successful. The watercolor typifies Dufy’s style at this time, when his hands had been compromised and his ability to paint diminished so much that he had to strap his brushes to them. The cheerful palette of The Brooklyn Bridge testifies to the artist’s early association with the Fauves; in 1905, when he saw Henri Matisse’s painting Luxe, Calme et volupté at the Salon des Indépendents in Paris, he joined the group called “les Fauves” (“the wild beasts”),the group so-called for their saturated, unmixed colors and spontaneous brushwork. Dufy, who also flirted with Cubism, exhibited two oil paintings at the revolutionary Armory exhibition in New York in 1913. Eventually, he developed his individual style, which retains echoes of Fauvism, but superimposes sketchy drawings of observed scenes upon translucent washes, all in brilliant hues. This shorthand method of working, which has been termed “stenographic,” appears in the Hirschfeld watercolor and the drawing that preceded it. Together, they demonstrate why Dufy was not just a successful painter but also a noted draftsman, printmaker, illustrator, and scenic designer. The composition features a foreshortened, elevated view of one of its signature twin-arched towers with the arcs of its weight-bearing cables, implying the artist and viewer are positioned on the other tower. This bird’s-eye perch may induce a kind of vertigo as it reveals the island identity of Manhattan and the importance of the City’s East River bridge crossings. The related ballpoint sketch—in which the artist made trial scrolling doodles of calligraphic swirls along the upper left and top edges of the paper—includes at the left a dense sketch delineating the masonry of one of the bridge’s twin-arched towers. In the watercolor, Dufy transformed the more descriptive sketch with his color washes and by substituting a generalized bridge at the left, which may represent a span to the north—either the Williamsburg or Manhattan Bridge. Dufy’s relative lack of topographical specificity adds to the feeling of suspension in time and space, as well as over the water. This buoyant quality is accentuated in the watercolor by its floating transparent washes. Moreover, in the watercolor Dufy transformed the sketch’s linear solar disc with its long rays into a C-shaped greenish-yellow sun, created by one magisterial turn of his loaded brush. This optimistic vision, almost an ode, in which the rising sun seems to bless New York, may reflect the artist’s positive feeling about his efficacious medical treatment. In fact, it was so successful that Dufy dedicated some of his works to his American doctors and researchers; and then, in 1952, he went on to receive the grand prize for painting at the Twenty-sixth Venice Biennale. However, he died tragically soon thereafter of intestinal bleeding, which was likely a result of his successful arthritis treatment. Fittingly, Dufy was buried near Matisse in the Cimiez Monastery Cemetery in a suburb of Nice, the sunny Mediterranean city enshrined in so many of his works.

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