Raoul Dufy, born under the names Raoul Ernest Joseph le 3 June 1877 au Havre and died the 23 mars 1953 to Forcalquier son of Léon Auguste Dufy and Marie Eugénie Lemonnier, is a painter, draftsman, engraver, book illustrator, fabric designer, ceramist, tapestry and furniture designer, interior decorator, public space decorator and theatre decorator french.
From 1893, Raoul Dufy attends evening classes from Charles Lhuillier at theÉcole municipale des Beaux-Arts du Havre. It meets Raimond Lecourt and Othon Friesz with which he will then share a workshop at Montmartre and who will remain one of his most loyal friends. He painted Norman landscapes at thewatercolor.
In 1900, it enters theÉcole nationale supérieure des beaux-arts from Paris, where he finds Othon Friesz. He draws a lot. His first exhibition (at Salon des Artistes français) takes place in 1901. Then he exhibits in 1903 au Salon des Indépendants. The Painter Maurice Denis buys him a canvas. He painted a lot around Le Havre, including on the beach of Sainte-adresse made famous by Eugène Boudin and Claude Monet. In 1904, with his friend Albert Marquet, he works, always on the pattern, on Fécamp.
In 1903-1904 and 1906-1907 Dufy stayed at Hammers in Provence. He paints a series of landscapes depicting the city and its canals.
Influenced by the fauvism and in particular by the work of Matisse, he works with Friesz, Lecourt and Marquet on paintings of streets paved with flags, village festivals, beaches.
In 1908, realizing the paramount importance of Cézanne during the great retrospective of 1907, he abandons Fauvism. He performs studies of trees, horses, workshop models, still lifes. That same year he went to the Estaque1, near Marseille with Georges Braque. They paint, often side by side, the same patterns as Cézanne.
He stays in the Villa Medicis libre (which welcomes young painters devoid of resources) in Orgeville withAndré Lhote and Jean Marchand. In their company, he turned to constructions influenced by the early cubism de Braque and de Picasso.
In 1910 he made the engraved woods for the Bestiary d'Apollinaire. (He'll make more for the Legendary Poems from France and Brabant d'Émile Verhaeren).
In 1911, he married a Nice girl, Eugénie-Émilienne Brisson. Called by the great couturier Paul Poiret which was impressed by the engravings of the Bestiary, he embarked on creating patterns for fashion and decorative fabrics. This is because the printing of the fabrics is then done using engraved woods. Together with Paul Poiret, he set up a small fabric decoration and printing company, "La Petite Usine". There he printed his first hangings and fabrics that would make Paul Poiret famous. A year later, he was hired by the Lyon silk house Bianchini-Ferrier for which he created countless patterns based on his favorite themes (naïads, animals, birds, flowers, butterflies...), which were "mapped" for weaving on the jacquard looms. This collaboration will continue until 1930.
Always influenced by Cézanne, however, his drawing became more flexible during his stay in 1913 to Hyères.
In 1915, he enlisted in the Army's automotive service.
During his first stay at Wins in 1919, the colors of his paintings become brighter and his design more baroque.
It launches into the lithograph with the Madrigals from Mallarmé in 1920. (Later he will make some for The Murdered Poet from Guillaume Apollinaire). That same year theRooftop Beef from Jean Cocteau is depicted with Dufy sets and costumes.
Under Paul Poiret's leadership and eager to realize the effect of his fabrics on women, he began to frequent the racetracks in 1922 ; it aesthetically takes a liking to the spectacle of crowds, horses, and movements. He's making more and more watercolors, and working the ceramic from 1923 with the great Catalan ceramist Artiguas.
Dufy travels a lot. He discovers Italy (Venice, Florence, Rome, Naples, the Sicily) then Morocco and Spain. He admires the paintings of Titien au Prado Museum. He also travels to Belgium and England. He stays in Nice from 1925 to 1929 with his wife from Nice.
In 1926, watching a little girl running on the dock of Honfleur, it understands that the mind records color faster than the outline. It will then dissociate colors and drawing. He adds his design to wide bands of colors (usually three) horizontal or vertical, or to large colored spots.
It runs cartons for upholstery fabrics made of tapestry by the Manufacture de Beauvais on the theme of Paris. His painting Le Paddock enter the Musée du Luxembourg in 1932.
In 1936-1937, helped by his brother Jean Dufy, he produces for the Electricity Pavilion of the International Exhibition, the largest existing painting in the world: The Fairy Electricity (624 m2), now visible at museum of modern art of the City of Paris.
Raoul Dufy begins to feel, in 1937, the first to suffer from a painful and disabling illness: the rheumatoid arthritis. He is appointed a member of the jury of prix Carnegie to Pittsburgh.
The watercolors of Loire castles and Venice (many views of the city and lagoon) are born in 1938. It also works on very large panels for the palais de Chaillot : La Seine de Paris à la Mer. Othon Friesz realizes those of La Seine de la source in Paris.
Refugee in the south of France in the early 1940s, he painted cardboard for large tapestries Collioure and Le Bel Été. Dufy also excels at composing sets and stage costumes for the Comédie-Française. In his paintings, he gradually abandoned wide bands of color for a dominant overall hue."
Jean Cocteau publish and 1948 a book about Raoul Dufy in the collection "Les maîtres du dessin" (Éditions Flammarion).
Dufy illustrates the Earth Foods d'André Gide in 1949, then L'Herbier from Colette (1950). He is promoted to the rank of Commander of the Legion of Honor.
At the Musée d'Art et d'Histoire de Genève, 261 works, as well as ceramics, tapestries, books are collected in 1952. In addition, 41 works are sent by France to the Venice Biennale. He won the painting prize and offered the amount to an Italian painter and Charles Lapicque so they can stay in France and each other in Venice."" The Painter Alfred Manessier will be the last Frenchman to get this price. Dufy installs at Forcalquier in Haute-Provence.
That's where he dies on March 23rd 1953 from a heart attack. His last words were to ask his secretary to open the shutters of his bedroom to see the mountain. After a temporary burial, the city of Nice offers a location at the cemetery of Cimiez in 1956.
L'art de Raoul Dufy[modify]
L'impressionism[modify]
Raoul Dufy was first influenced by ""Eugène Boudin and impressionism, but it doesn't hold back the touch in comma : His, on the other hand, is becoming wider and more vigorous, as can be seen in La Plage de Sainte-adresse (1904) and After lunch (1905-1906). Early mastery of the watercolor, and already clues to his own future style in a work like the 14- July 1998 au Havre where shades are complemented at the Chinese ink.
Le fauvism[modify]
Raoul Dufy discovers Matisse and Signac. Dans La Place du village (1906), roses and greens are caught in fairly thick strokes emphasizing the architectures. Shadows are frank. A small French flag in a still impressionist sky announces the bright colors of Le Havre's cobbled streets, which he will paint in the company of Marquet.
Dans Le Port du Havre (1906), the boats' fumes are riddled with shivering and rippling that will later accentuate in Dufy's own style. The white spots on the sheds and boats come, along with a few French flags, to light up an ensemble still a little too dull to be truly wild.
On the other hand, the Pink nude in green armchair (Claudine back) (1906) is of very distinctly Fauvist invoice. The palette is close to that of the Matisse des Interiors from Collioure or The Green Ray (Portrait of Madame Matisse) from 1905. Note the secondary shots treated with wide, parallel keys, reminiscent of Cézanne, although Dufy doesn't yet have a good knowledge of this painter's work.
- "In the Pink nude with green armchair or Claudine back from 1906, au museum of the Annunciation in Saint-Tropez, Dufy, of whom he's probably the only nude of this period, scaffolds simplified planes of shadow and light on the model's contorted body, which he submits to his imagination of form. The arm's clear arabesque responds to this wide spot of light that covers his back, and the ambiguous play of the red ochre-plated legs.” This nude is a feat; what the drawing loses in sensuality, it gains in colorful expressive strength." 2.
In the backgrounds of The swing (1905-1906), the touch in sticks reminiscent of some Vincent van Gogh of Provence.
Le cubism cezannien[modify]
In 1907, Dufy can admire the paintings of Cézanne during the retrospective at the Salon d'Automne. In order to understand Cézanne about the very patterns he painted, he leaves for the "Stake with Georges Braque, another adopted Havre, who attended the same municipal school of Fine Arts as Friesz and Dufy.
Dans L'Estaque (1908), the shapes, just suggested by blue lines in the distance, are reminiscent of the Montagne Sainte-Victoire from the Cézanne de la maturity. The houses of Village by the sea (1908) are reduced to simple geometry.
Keys are cezannian (oblique and flat brush), tones are low contrast. TheStake Tree (1908) by Dufy could have been signed by the Georges Braque des Maisons à l'Estaque (1908). Squared like pieces of rock, the houses of Braque and Dufy, are little more mineral than the sky, sea, or trees. As with Cézanne, the real subject of their paintings is volume and depth. However, Dufy soon escaped to further research, as Que Braque sought to develop and exhaust the resources of pattern geometricization.
- « Stake Trees, which is at the Musée Cantini in Marseille, belongs to a series of researches of volumes broken down into superimposed geometric planes framed by parallel trunks, sometimes bent into warheads that balance their arrangement. The harmony of ochres and greens, the trees' barrels and gray branches, is deliberately sober. Braque, which runs a similar series alongside it, also holds up to this simple geometry and austerity. It's the internal structure of things they both pursue, but Dufy won't get locked into the Cezanian pattern Braque will explore. » 2
Raoul Dufy wont even come close to the almost abstraction of synthetic cubism. He remains attached to the readability of his paintings. Its colors are gaining brightness and diversity. Dufy may have influenced Picasso which often took up other painters' ideas on its own. La Cage d'oiseaux (1923) by the Spanish painter has many relatives with The Bird's Cage (1913-1914), up to the work's title which differs only by a plural.” But while Picasso's color is in solidarity with the line, Dufy's flatness imposes itself without necessary relation to an allusive, rudimentary drawing of “simple graphic abbreviations,” writes Pierre Cabanne2.
