Raoul Dufy (1877-1953)

La maison dans les arbres demonstrates Raoul Dufy's embrace of a cubist-inspired organization of space and volume. Like many of his colleagues, the painter had found inspiration for this new direction at the Cézanne retrospective at the 1907 Salon d'Automne. The following year, he joined Braque at L'Estaque, and the two painters rendered the local trees and hillsides in rigorously juxtaposed, simplified planes. Commenting on Dufy's selective adoption of cubist methods, Dora Perez-Tibi has stated: "While Braque, like Picasso, was to take his experiments further, towards an almost hermetic analysis of forms--conveying their internal structures in an explosion of facets on the surface of the canvas, the source of the cubist aesthetic--Dufy would go on to rediscover the spirit of the older painter's method, and intensify his experiments with the expressive possibilities of space that Cézanne's aesthetic offered to him" (in Raoul Dufy, London, 1989, p. 37).

La maison dans les arbres spotlights Dufy's incorporation of cubist techniques into a distinctly personal style. In this work, a chateau is nestled, it's balustrade partially obscured by lush trees and foliage. Though the dense composition is largely free of perspective and relies on an architectonic structuring of space in superimposed planes, what distinguishes Dufy's work from that of Braque and Picasso is that was that he preserves the recognizable character of his forms. Here, Dufy briefly adopts a restricted palette of greens and ochres which he is soon to discard in favour of his fauve palette. It is a rare moment of pure Cézanne-inspired exploration of the cubist style that was closely related to, yet always distinct from mainstream Cubism.