In 1946, American writer Gertrude Stein described Raoul Dufy as a painter of pleasure.
The artist got his start in painting before moving into the decorative arts, creating highly modern, sensitive works with a personal style that approaches the avant-garde while joyfully representing a love of life.
Zoom on Raoul Dufy
Raoul Dufy was born on June 3 1877 in Le Havre, Normandy, to a family of humble origins. His father passed down a passion for music that would feature in many of his works, which often include musical instruments, auditoriums, and concerts.
Memories of his childhood in Le Havre are strewn throughout his paintings. Much of his work reflects his love of the sea, ports, and holiday resorts – his earliest source of inspiration.
At 14 he worked as a delivery boy while studying art at night and then got a scholarship to attend the École des Beaux-Arts in Paris in 1900.
During his early years in the capital of the Belle Époque, he was influenced by the Impressionists and the Post-Impressionists and participated in many group shows, including the Salon des Indépendants and the Salon d’Automne.
Later Matisse and the bright colors of the Fauves would guide him toward a more modern style in vogue at the time. After a stay with George Braque, Dufy began composing his paintings according to Cézanne‘s tenets.
Raoul Dufy and the Fashion World
In 1910 he shifted to the decorative arts, making a name for himself in everything from woodcut, graphic art, and illustration to scenery design, ceramics, and textiles.
His taste for beauty then led him to the fashion world.
For twenty years he designed fabrics for couturier Paul Poiret and silk manufacturer Bianchini Ferier. His textiles often had vibrant, contrasting floral motifs that were highly original for their time, uniting painting and decorative art in an extraordinary way.
The emergence of haute couture and luxury brands in Paris during those years made Dufy famous and wealthy, allowing him to move into a studio in Montmartre that he kept for the rest of his life.
Modernity gave Dufy the Cézanne-inspired idea to associate drawing, color, and composition. Color plays a key role in his paintings, creating light in harmony with the lines.
Raoul Dufy’s Favorite Subjects
His favorite subjects were horses, flower vases, and landscapes, as well as outdoor social scenes like horse races, regattas, performances, and beach holidays.
He sought to convey a cheerful energy and the pure happiness of the moment.
Through his great manual skills, his craft, he developed a complex plastic vocabulary of curls, arabesques, commas, and dots, which he used to show a deeper side of things beyond their immediate appearance.
Raoul Dufy’s Trip to Italy
From March to May 1922, he traveled around Italy visiting Florence, Rome, and Naples before arriving in Sicily where he discovered the dense, consistent light and classic landscapes of the south.
While his income from luxury brands dried up with the 1930s depression, he was already famous enough to procure some important official commissions.
Raoul Dufy’s Electricity Fairy
The world’s largest painting
One of these was the gigantic Electricity Fairy (fee), a 600-square-meter mural designed for the 1937 International Exhibition of Art and Technology in Modern Life in Paris.
Modernity and classicism intermingle in this colossal work, called the largest painting in the world.
Here Dufy demonstrated his sophisticated eclecticism as an image hunter. He was widely seen as embodying the utopian union of art, industry, decoration, and design being theorized in the postwar period.
This was when the artist began suffering from degenerative arthritis, which would hinder him for the rest of his career.
Venice Biennale Prize
In 1952 he won first prize at the Venice Biennale and his work became known internationally.
He died the following year at age 75. He refused to allow his debilitating disease to interfere with his work or diminish his great joie di vivre. Pleasure was always a serious matter for him. The fetes in his paintings are never frivolous. Instead, they exude novelty and hedonism, earning him the name as a ‘painter of joy and light.’
A painter of pleasure, as American writer Stein wrote in 1946 about an artist who moved from painting to the decorative arts, creating highly modern, sensitive works with a personal style that approaches the avant-garde while joyfully representing a love of life.
Raoul Dufy – The Painter of Joy
Palazzo Cipolla
Rome