Raoul Dufy: Sempre Primavera

Poor Raoul Dufy,  often compared to his almost exact contemporary, the social critic and mystic Georges Roualt.  Dufy was neither. What he was instead was a modern day Watteau, a master of the fete galante for a middle class audience, a painter of mood rather than narrative, an artist whose influence on decorative arts, costume, and music is still felt.  Such a painter would turn easily to the easily recognizable image of Botticell's Venus, that symbol of rebirth, in the thick of wartime Paris

A poet of trains and boats and planes, Dufy  (1877-1953) was born in the unprepossessing port city of Le Havre, which he left as soon as he decently  could for Paris.  There the 'Cage of Wild Beasts', as the new generation of young artists at the Salon d'Automne of 1905 was called , more than art school,  was Dufy's education. .

 In Woman In Pink,  his portrait of his future wife, Emilienne Busson, he borrows Van Gogh's clusters of parallel lines, transmuted  from anxiety into positive energy.  The greens and yellow s seem to radiate from the woman, rather than her surroundings,; in contrast the blue door and orange floor are flat and featureless.  Emileinne's personality is vividly delineated with minimal facial modeling and her physical presence is almost sculptural, conveyed with  hints of lavender applied to the pink dress.

 If there was such a thing as Rococo Cubism, then Dufy's Bird Cage was it.  Watteau would have understood the impulse if not the style.  True, the bird is oddly bisected by blocks of color, but why not when the white lines at left suggest daylight blocked out by a window shade, counterbalanced by a shower of white dots to the right that looks like  stars falling from a  night sky.

One of the artist's best known images, Trent ans, ou la vie en rose, owes its name not to the Edith Piaf song but rather from a project Dufy had recently completed for the dealer Ambroise Vollard.  Dufy provided  the illustrations for a book by Eugene Montfort, La Belle Enfant  (The Beautiful Child, subtitled The Love of Forty Years).  The rose wallpaper decorating his Montmartre studio was also designed by commission from a wallpaper company.  Projects like these have provided ammunition for those who would fault Dufy for a lack of seriousness.

The injustice of timing as it has influenced Dufy's reputation remains puzzling.  Here was an artist who painted the subjects that the Impressionists made familiar and did it in a style that owes something to Henri Matisse.! True, most of his paintings were executed at a small scale and intended to be viewed in a correspondingly intimate fashion.  By that measure, Dufy's wallpaper becomes his greatest achievement.


Instead, there is La Fee Electricite, one of the largest frescoes ever created on  commission from the Paris Electric Company to illustrate the 'House of Electricity' for the Paris International Exposition of 1937.

 Here Dufy pictures himself in his Paris studio, examining some drawings,. We know what the world that presses in through his windows was like in 1940, the year of  Birth of Venus (at top).  Also, Dufy was beginning to be troubled by crippling rheumatoid arthritis, for which there was little help at the time. Soon Dufy needed a cane to walk.  When I wrote  about  American expatriate Therese Bonney and how she helped the artist get to the United States for medical treatment, it was for the new experimental cortisone shots to ease the pain of his arthritis, that allowed him to continue painting.

What I like in this  image of  Dufy's atelier in Nice is the visual pun  of the classical statue posed as though she, like the artist, is looking at the view while the view is coming through the window.

In one painting,  Still Life (1941) displays all the bravura technique of line and color that Dufy had in his fingers. Cupped in a bowl, apples glow with  invitation, a splash of red wine, and tactile round  fresh bread .  The scene is bracketed by an  array of greens, between the precisely rendered vignette of beans and the ukiyo-e pattern of leaves cascading from the upper right corner.  The artist's signature is modestly faint; by now we recognize his spirit.

1.  The Birth of Venus, c. 1940, Musee d'Art Moderne

de la ville de Paris.

2. Bateau Pavoise, c. 1905, Musee des Beaus-Arts, Lyon.

3. Portrait of Emilienne Busson, 1908, Pompidou Center, Paris.

4. Bird Cage,  1914, private collection, Paris.

5. Trente ans, ou la vien en rose, 1931, Musee d'Art Moderne de la ville de Paris.

6 L'Atelier de l"Impasse Guelma, Pompidou Center, Paris
7. La Fee Electricite, lithograph, c.1936,  Chateau de Villeneuve, Vence.

8. L'Atelier, 1940, Musee d'art Moderne, Troyes.

9. L'Atelier, 1947, Musee d'Art Moderne, Ceret.
10. Still Life, 1941, Evergreen House Foundation, Baltimore.

11. Self-Portrait, c. 1935, Musee d"Art Moderne de la ville de Paris.

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