Thirty years or Life in pink

/ Raoul Dufy /

Thirty years or life in pink, 1931, is a painting produced in the artist’s Montmartre studio in the impasse Guelma in Paris on the wall of which was stretched some floral fabric painted by Dufy for the Lyon silk manufacturer Bianchini-Férier (here we have his Cornets fabric, designed in 1919). The title conjures up the light insouciance of The Beautiful Child or Love at forty, a work by Eugène Montfort which he had recently illustrated for Ambroise Vollard. The illusion of decor is created using the redundant motif of the bowl of flowers on the
printed canvas and its frame and by the presence of a vase of flowers on a pedestal table, or virtual pedestal table reproduced in the same colour. The composition displays renewed vitality, drawing on variations and repetition of the floral motif painted in the same range of pink and deep purple with hints of green - a life in pink full of transparency and superimposed objects in which drawing and colour are dissociated.