Raoul Dufy Biography

In 1906 Raoul Dufy gained attention as one of the artists exhibiting in the Paris Salon d'Autumne that the critics deemed Fauves (Wild Beasts). He was to enjoy a long and successful career during which he transformed Fauvism's flat, astonishing palette and spontaneous drawing into a personal style filled with wit, lyrical line and sumptuous color. Best known for his themes depicting social settings filled with figures and activity such as horse races, regattas, orchestras and casinos his creativity was in fact boundless.

As with many progressive artists in the early 1900's, Raoul Dufy was fascinated with the works of both Vincent van Gogh and Paul Cezanne who were having large scale retrospective exhibitions in Paris then for the first time. Dufy had an outstanding sense of color honed by designing fabrics for the fashion designer Paul Poiret at Maison Bianchi-Ferier from 1910 onward. One of the key design elements he incorporated into his work from this experience was the concept of layering broad bands of color through- out a composition, adding a sense of depth and drama. Cubism also played a part in Dufy's early development. He worked side by side with Georges Braque in the summer of 1908 in L'Estaque where they both painted landscapes in a Cubist manner. However, by 1913 the height of that movement, Raoul Dufy had already moved on, developing his own personal style. In essence he allowed the white ground of the canvas to unify the painted elements easing the transitions between objects. He created spatial tension by employing varying brushstrokes throughout the composition, and personalized the Fauve palette by adding softer colors such as pale pink, aqua, and yellow. To this mix Dufy also added bold black for heavy accents as he understood van Gogh had done. The oil on canvas titled Sainte-Addresse, 1924, in this exhibition effectively captures these elements of Dufy's mature style, as well as being clearly influenced by Cubism.

In the early 1920's the success of Raoul Dufy's one-man shows with Galerie Bernheim-Jeune, Paris, enabled him to travel extensively to paint. When home in France Dufy divided his time between Vence in the Midi and Saint-Adresse near Le Havre, Normandy, the sight of his childhood on the coast of the English Channel. His travels made the artist keenly aware of the effects of light upon color and he developed his theory of "couleur-lumiere": "Light is the soul of color, without light, color is lifeless."1 Rather then paint what he actually saw, Dufy freely reinvented the scene investing it with tonalities and hues that he formulated subjectively. Traditional perspective was abandoned, distance was often telescoped and objects in the composition appeared in any scale the artist selected.

Following WWII, Dufy elected to spend his time primarily in Vence where he returned to the theme of the nude and the studio, à la Matisse. The spectacular L'atelier de Vence, 1945, oil on canvas seen here, is a tour de force depicting both an exquisite model in the serenely lit and detailed artist's studio as well as a very complete, dramatic landscape outside. A "painting within a painting" handled with complete mastery.

1. Quoted in Dufy by D. Perez-Tibi, p. 134, NY, 1989