Street Decked with Flags

Street Decked with Flags, also at the Centre Georges Pompidou, was painted in 1906 during the national celebrations surrounding Bastille Day, when Paris and provincial towns hung tricolor flags from their windows and facades. Dufy had seen Monet's Rue Montorgueil of 1878, and his own version transposes the patriotic festivity into Fauve-period color intensity. The cascading flags give the composition its vertical rhythmic structure—a forest of red, white, and blue that reduces the actual street to a background element.

The tricolor flags are painted in loose, overlapping strokes of pure red, white, and blue that merge and separate across the picture surface. Dufy deliberately avoids precise description of individual flags, instead building the composition from the collective chromatic impact of their repeated vertical forms against the darker street below.