Louis Valtat (French, 1869-1952), "Femmes au Theatre", ca. 1920s, oil on paper laid down on cradled wood panel, stamped with initials "L.V." lower center (Lugt 1771bis), 30-1/4" x 21-1/4". Presented in a giltwood and gesso frame. Provenance: Christie's Impressionist & Modern Paintings, Drawings & Sculpture, New York City, Sale 7674, May 13, 1993, lot 228; Property from the Estate of Mrs. Ted Bates, New Haven, Connecticut; The Estate of Gary Baxter Webb, Houston, Texas. Louis Valtat, the son of a prosperous merchant- who himself had artistic inclinations- spent much of his youth in picturesque Versailles. Accepted at the Ecole des Beaux-Arts in Paris, he studied under such Academic masters as Jean-Joseph Benjamin Constant and Gustave Boulanger before entering the Academie Julian in 1891. While at the Academie, he befriended, among others, Edouard Vuillard and Pierre Bonnard, whose experimentations with a more "modern" approach to painting, inspired by the synthetism of Paul Gaugin, were to influence his work. At the age of 21, Valtat opened his own studio in Paris, where his use of a bold color palette, emphasis of line, and painterly brushstroke resulted in his being associated with the Fauves, following his inclusion in the 1905 Salon d'Automne exhibition where he exhibited alongside Vuillard, Matisse, Derain and Vlamanick. A critic, at the time, denounced the show as an orgy of colors on par with "fauves" - wild beasts. Taking their lead from the pioneers of Post-Impressionism- van Gogh, Gaugin and Toulouse-Lautrec, the "Fauves" privileged emotive and symbolic applications of color over purely optical ones as Monet and the Impressionists did. Their art was also equally influenced by the wide black lines employed in Japanese woodblocks (which Toulouse-Lautrec adopted in his lithographs) and decorative arts- namely tapestries. In 1894, Valtat collaborated with Toulouse-Lautrec and Albert Andre (see lot 280) to create the decor for the Theatre de l' OEuvre- an experimental theater in Paris founded by the Symbolists. The work presented here is a wonderful example of the Fauvist style at its most accomplished and successful. In the mid-1920s, at the same time Valtat created several paintings of women at the theater that are strikingly similar to this one, he was also actively engaged as a draftsman/designer for the tapestry manufacturer Beauvais. In this painting, the women at the theatre are a fantastic swirl of bold colors uncontained in any illusion of pictorial space; the foreground and background effortlessly blend into a rich pattern. The figures, neatly delineated by thick black lines into swatches of color, recall tapestry drawings and maquettes. This painting's seemingly simplistic "wild" design bellies its compositional complexity as a masterpiece of avant-garde and decorative art.