Les Affiches à Trouville

Les Affiches à Trouville, at the Centre Georges Pompidou in Paris, is one of Dufy's most distinctive early works, combining his interest in coastal tourism with the visual culture of advertising hoardings. The posters plastered on a seaside wall at Trouville become pictorial elements in their own right, their typography and colors integrated into the composition as graphic material. Dufy was alert to the modern visual environment in a way that anticipates later movements, and this painting stands as an early precedent for Pop Art's engagement with commercial imagery.

The advertising posters are rendered with legible fragments of text and bold color blocks that echo the real posters' graphic character while being subsumed into the painting's overall chromatic scheme. Dufy's brushwork shifts between the fluent description of the resort architecture and the flat, near-printed quality of the poster surfaces.