Overview
‘My eyes were made to erase all that is ugly’ – Raoul Dufy
Raoul Dufy was a painter associated with the Fauves, who were known for their use of wild and vivid colours. He worked in a variety of media, including oils, watercolour (he produced over 6000), gouache, textiles and woodcuts. His paintings include many scenes of luxury and pleasure, and are characterised by vivid colours, calligraphic brush marks, brightly coloured backgrounds and a sense of joie de vivre.
Dufy was born in Le Havre, France, in 1877. After taking night classes in Le Havre, he obtained a scholarship to Paris in 1900. There he enrolled at the École des Beaux-Arts, although he was much more interested in Impressionist painters such as Manet, Monet and Pissaro, and Post-Impressionists such as Toulouse-Lautrec and Van Gogh, rather than academic painters.
Dufy had his first exhibition at the Salon des Indépendants in 1903, but three years later he abandoned Impressionism. He produced works with glowing colours and broad sweeping brush strokes aligned which aligned him more closely with the Fauvists such as Henri Matisse – whose paintings greatly impressed Dufy. Fauvism, derived from the French word fauve meaning ‘wild beast’ was an art movement known for its radical use of vivid, contrasting colours.
Cézanne’s exhibition at Salon d’Automne in 1907 also impressed Dufy, and led him to paint in a more sober style, using a muted palette and more angular forms. The following year Dufy worked with Georges Braque, who later developed Cubism with Pablo Picasso. While his paintings became more formally structured during this period, Dufy did not go as far towards Cubism, and he continued to use more vivid colours than Braque.
A trip to Munich in 1909 led to Dufy’s discovery of Expressionism and the possibilities of wood-engraving. Dufy had a number of friends who were writers, including the famous French poet Apollonaire, and he illustrated a number of books with woodcuts. In 1911 he began using woodcut in textile design in association with Paul Poiret, the most fashionable dress-designer of pre–First World War Europe. From 1912 – 1930 Dufy designed fabrics for Bianchini-Ferrier, a leading French textile company.
Dufy was also an accomplished interior designer, and regularly exhibited his designs at the Salon des Artistes Décorateurs. He carried out a number of important commissions, including the decoration of Paul Poiret’s three boats.
During the 1920s Dufy travelled extensively, and painted a series of vivid scenes of the French seaside, which, along with the racecourse, was one of his favourite subjects. The influence of the seaside on Dufy’s works can be traced to his childhood in Le Havre, a coastal town.
Throughout this period, Dufy’s painting matured into what is now regarded as his definitive style. Following a set formula, he superimposed calligraphic lines onto patches of bright colour. Thematically the paintings reflected the sense of unrestrained joy and pleasure which prevailed in post-war France. Te Papa has a lithograph, Trois Baigneuses (Three Bathers), from this period.
In 1935 the artist began to explore a new medium – oil paints specially prepared by a chemist that reproduced the freshness and lightness usually associated with watercolours. He used these new oils in 1937 to create his remarkable work La Fée Électricité (The Electricity Fairy). The seventy–thousand–square–foot painting, was created for the Palace of Light at the 1937 International Exposition in Paris.
Towards the end of his life, Dufy’s work was marked by a greater austerity. His signature style of contrasting vivid colours was frequently abandoned in favour of tones all of one shade. However, it is his gay and colourful scenes for which he is most remembered. ‘Above all else, it is a sense of the sheer joy of life that Raoul Dufy conveys – in his style, in his radiant colours, in his subject matter, and in his ability to impart sensuous delight to the viewer.’ (1)
In 1952, Dufy was awarded the International Grand Prix at the twenty–sixth Biennale in Venice and died the next year, aged seventy six.
Reference
(1) Werner Alfred. (1973). Raoul Dufy London: Thames and Hudson. inside jacket note.
Text originally published in Tai Awatea, Te Papa's onfloor multimedia database.