French, 1877-1953
To be included in the forthcoming supplement
to the Raoul Dufy Catalogue Raisonnè des dessins
Our work on paper is a study
for an oil painting by the same title
Born in 1877 in the Havre, Raoul Dufy comes from a numerous family. Forced to earn his living from the age of fourteen years, he prematurely dropped the classical studies.
Provided with a grant of his city and cleared of military service, he moved to Paris in 1900 and take there lessons in Beaux Arts. He lives in Montmartre with his friend Othon Friesz. But he finds his true inspiration by looking at the windows of the big traders of art of epoch where he admires impressionists.
In 1904, he turns to the fauvism and exhibits personally in 1906 in the “Salon d’Automne”. Cézanne constitutes for him a source of constant inspiration and he shows it by going to Marseilles with Braque to paint there the same topics. A short cubist period comes then. And it is finally in 1909, after a stay in Munich with Othon Friesz, and having gone around progressive currents, that Dufy clears his own personality.
Hard influenced by the German expressionism and Decorative arts, he develops his theory of colour-light and practiced it on different support especially on cloth. From his collaboration with the fashion designer Poiret, who allows him to exercise his art over cloth, has been born the publicity of the painter: inspired by horse races, rooms of concerts but also by the Mediterranean Sea, he launches into big series on the same topics. He shows his peculiarity in a cursive, telegraphic style where light flows in small pencils.
Hired from 1912 till 1930 by the home of silk Bianchini-Ferrier, he develops numerous motives dear to his favourite topics: naiads, animals, butterflies, birds... He paints in addition to more watercolours and tried himself in the ceramic with the Catalan grand master Artiguas.
Travelling a lot in Mediterranean Sea, Dufy works more and more on light and on his predominance on colour and movement in large "puddles" prior to motive. His work was completely imprinted of “the joy to giving to discover”. Dufy had a look on world filled with wonder and restores it in a transparent and quasi exhaustive simplicity.
He accomplished a monumental work in 1936-37 for World fair, « The fairy electricity », 60 metres long on 10, visible today in the Museum of Modern Art of Paris.
From 1937, he began suffering from polyarthrite, illness which will handicap him till his death in 1953, having accepted the alternatives of peinture of Biennial of Venice one year earlier.
