Painted shortly after Raoul Dufy’s encounter with Henri Matisse’s work in 1905, Still Life with Closed Shutters employs rich, saturated colors to depict a table covered abundantly with fruit. Dufy, like Matisse, came to be associated with the Fauves (“wild beasts”), whose paintings separated color from its descriptive or representational function. Here, color does not conform to the natural world. Whites, blues, pinks, and greens all blend together, indicating perspective and volume while also revealing the flatness of the canvas.

Wall label, 2021.