La Redécouverte de la Croix, d'après Tintoret

Painted in 1945 on panel and held at the Musée Hyacinthe-Rigaud in Perpignan, this work depicting Tintoretto's 'Rediscovery of the Cross' (after the Venetian master) represents Dufy's late engagement with art history through copying or paraphrasing great paintings. Tintoretto's dramatic, light-filled Venetian canvases were a natural point of reference for an artist committed to luminosity and decorative composition. Late copies and reinterpretations often reveal an artist's deepest formal commitments, and Dufy's version of Tintoretto would render the Venetian's dramatic narrative in his own radically simplified, joyful chromatic language.

Dufy's panel interpretation of Tintoretto transposes the Venetian's dramatic chiaroscuro and complex figure groupings into his own flat, linear idiom. The architectural setting and clustered figures are reduced to swift notational marks over which transparent color washes create the luminous atmosphere that for Dufy was the essential quality he found in Tintoretto's art.