Raoul Dufy
French, 1888-1953

Composition, 1928
oil on canvas
55 1/2 x 59 1/2 in.

SBMA, Museum purchase with funds from the bequest of Mrs. Alfred B. Clark
1974.41



Photo of Dufy in 1920, age 43

RESEARCH PAPER

NICE GUY, PRETTY PICTURES

When you run across something written about Raoul Dufy, you’re likely to discover that the author has set himself up as a sort of apologist. Seems Dufy was so even-tempered and generally kind, that his life’s story went pretty much unremarked upon. And his paintings, apparently, are so accessible, that as an artist he can be easily overlooked as the innovator he actually was. To quote one such author, "His life was not picturesque, his art was not provoking." But I’m prepared to give the Dufy admirers among you the ammunition to defend your position. And for those of you who have skirted this piece, Composition, in the Ridley Tree Gallery, I’m here to argue its place on your tour.

The Artist
It seems not even Monsieur Dufy thought he had the stuff to be an artist, let alone a great one. His earliest artistic aspirations were to collect paintings, not create them. Dufy was born in Le Harve, France, on June 3, 1888, one of nine children. His family’s means were modest, but there was a richness to their lives. Outside their home, on the outskirts of town, there was a lovingly maintained garden. Inside the home, there was music — Raoul’s father played the organ in his spare time. A love of music and of cultivated nature would inform Dufy’s entire life and work. Dufy had to leave school when he was fourteen so that he could bring in money. He got a job working for a Swiss importer of Brazilian coffee, a position that required him to spend much of his day standing on the bridge of large cargo vessels, counting incoming and outgoing shipments as they emerged from and disappeared into the hold.

It was while there in the open air of the harbor, that Dufy found himself transfixed by certain qualities of light. He decided that he wanted to at least try to capture those qualities on canvas. Later Dufy would say that color equaled light, that light was the soul of color. Light was what we perceived first, he believed, color only afterwards.

Dufy enrolled in evening classes at the municipal art school, and there he had the good fortune to be taught by a fine artist and a great teacher, one who also taught another young La Harve resident named George Braque. Dufy learned to draw with such facility there, that he made himself start working with his left hand. And although he continued to approach written work with his right hand, he ultimately preferred painting and drawing with his left. Dufy began to paint out of doors on Sundays, and to visit museums where he admired Boudin, Corot, Poussin, Gericault and Delacroix. During one such excursion, he had the first of two ephiphanous moments before a painting. It occurred while he was standing before La Justice de Trajan at the museum of Rouen, a moment when he said he learnt the deep feeling of painting and discovered a new world.

At the turn of the century, when Dufy was 23, he got a scholarship to study at the Ecole des Beaux Arts in Paris. And although he was less fortunate with his assignment of a teacher there — the one he had favored somber dark colors, and looked unfavorably on the vivid, joyous palette that Dufy was developing — Dufy found his inspiration elsewhere. His daily walk to school took him down the Rue Lafitte where, in the windows of the Durand-Ruel gallery, he saw the works of the Impressionists. Next-door was the Vollard Gallery with pictures by Gauguin and Cezanne. Nearby, the Goupil Gallery exhibited Lautrec. A major exhibition of works by Van Gough took place at Bernheim’s in 1901. Dufy was also seeing Monet’s paintings of the beaches in Normandy, along with the works of Pissaro and Jongkind. Here, at last, was the exuberance Dufy wanted to express in his own work. A friend described Dufy during this struggling-artist period as pulling off great decency on the meager sum of one hundred francs a month. Unlike many of his companions, he was never seen without a collar, and his shoes were invariably well shined. Music remained important. When forced to choose between buying supper or tickets to a Sunday afternoon concert, he went hungry.

A second pivotal moment in front of a painting occurred in 1905 when he saw Matisse’s Luxe, Calme et Volupté. Dufy expressed the moment this way: "I understood the new raison d’être of painting, and Impressionist realism lost its charm for me as I beheld this miracle of the creative imagination at play, in color and drawing."

As it turns out, 1905 was quite a year for many young artists. Impressionism was then old stuff. Fauvism was reaching its apex. Gauguin had died two years before, but his work was still drawing attention. So were the passionate paintings of Van Gogh who had died in 1893. Gustave Moreau’s pupils, including Matisse and Roualt, had left the Ecole des Beaux Arts, and their paintings were beginning to cause a stir. Dufy would become a fauve, but one of a softer, gentler sort.

About 1908, Dufy discovered Cezanne. Cubism was on the horizon, as painters, having pushed the envelope when it came to color, now turned to the challenges of form. Dufy’s experiments with Cubism only served to alienate his dealer along with the few patrons he had so far managed to attract. But what persisted from this period was a greater reliance on forms and a firmer drawing technique. Still, the most immediately result was impending poverty, and Dufy turned to woodcuts.

During 1909 and 1910, Dufy worked on a commission to create woodcuts for Apollinaire’s Bestiare (to the left). He worked the wood into an even distribution of broad planes broken by blank spaces that somehow gave the impression of light. When the book was published in 1911, it was recognized as an innovative approach to book making. Today it is highly coveted by bibliophiles. That same year, Duffy was approached by a fashion designer, and asked to apply a similar technique to fabric design. The dresses were an instant success, and it has been said that Dufy’s designs were the genesis of all modern fabric styles.

By 1920, Dufy decided to concentrate on painting exclusively. He traveled to the French Riviera, and developed a new organization of colors that did away with the Impressionist palette entirely. His shapes began to simplify. Nature had become outdated. It contained too many variations. Dufy turned to creating his own reality, one with consistent form and harmony. By now he was not so much recording what he saw around him, as inventing his own world. Dufy would enjoy great success in his lifetime. At the 1952 Venice Biennial, the year before he died, the entire room of the French Pavilion was dedicated to him, and he won the International Prize for Painting.

His Work
Dufy’s work can be divided into four great themes. One would be The Town. A second would be Man and his Life, which included portraits, nudes, studio scenes, parties, and music. Music, of course, was a great influence from his childhood on. It informed his canvases even when their subject wasn’t musicians, for Dufy’s mature style sought out harmonious vibrations among his colors, and used line as a staccato accent. A third grand theme, and one that reflected another lifelong influence, was the sea. Dufy painted fishermen, yachts, regattas, and palm-lined promenades. But again, even when the sea wasn’t the subject of a painting, it was often a presence. It showed up in his signature blues — clear, vibrant, luminous blues. They seep into his paintings of racehorses, and of the countryside. You see them in our own Composition upstairs.

Which brings us to the fourth main theme: the countryside. Dufy painted mowing, castle ruins, flowers, and wheat. He was particularly drawn to the wheat fields and vineyards of nearby Burgundy. Composition also contains two of his reoccurring motifs, which appear throughout his canvases like leitmotifs in music. One is the scattered still-life of grapes, melon and strawberries on the grass, signs of the earth’s abundance, first seen in Dufy’s illustrations for the poems in Le Bestiare. Another is le donjon, the romantic brick ruin of a tower or a castle keep in Normandy, which makes its first appearance here. When it came to color, what mattered to Dufy was its value in relation to those around it. He said, "When there are a number of similar things together, some trees for instance, one must not separate the light and shadow of every object, but assemble some trees together with the colors of shadow and the others with the colors of light. Thus, having thee oranges and seeing three colors: orange, shadow and yellow light, one must paint the first orange, orange, the second one darker, and the third one yellow." This would give him the same total of light and shadow as if he had divided them proportionately within each piece. In this way, he could paint reality without imitating it. Furthermore, the juxtaposition of colors would set up a kind of rhythm. As for shapes, what may look almost improvisational was anything but. For example, among the papers Dufy left behind were literally hundreds of sketches of a single musician who ultimately showed up in one of Dufy’s orchestra paintings looking offhand and spontaneous. He was able to distill reality to such an essence, that it appeared invented.

His volumes have no real density. His dimensions do not correspond to perspective, but to an overall sense of harmony. And his canvases — they radiate optimism, which, along with his freedom from sentimentality, his sense of speed and vitality, went with the youthful zeitgeist of the era between the two world wars. On an emotional level, Dufy’s work has been said to contain the attributes of luxury, and love. They are civilized and sophisticated, but also suffused with a wonderment and what he is beholding, a delicate balance between worldliness and spirit. First-hand accounts of the man himself are said to emphasize amiability, cheerfulness, and wit. As we know, the world changed drastically in the 1940s, and art changed along with it. Dufy’s work seemed to belong to a more carefree time of high style and worldly pleasures.

Contemporaries like Picasso, Matisse and Leger moved on, but Dufy grew crippled by arthritis during that decade, Amiable still, he joked that he was the art in arthritis. After he died in 1953, there were the obligatory memorial exhibitions, and then his stature began to fade. Bright colors were passé. Smartness and elegance were no longer prized. But today, in the gallery, just try to walk a group of school children past the arresting panoply of Composition. Instead, stand there, and they will find the train with its effluence of smoke standing upright like an abstracted feather. Accept its invitation to revel in color and vivacious line, in the simple beholding of a bountiful, Burgundian afternoon. In your momentary willingness to eschew modern, cynical sophistication, discover, instead, the innocence of a bygone era. Like Bierstadt’s Mirror Lake, that shows us the breath of a pool now choked by silt, salute this testament to a bygone era, one we could never know, would never know, were it not for the preserved and singular vision of one Raoul Dufy.

Presented to the Docent Council in November, 2002, by Lisa Robertson

Sources
Dufy: Biographical and Critical Studies, translated by James Emmons, ninth in a collection titled The Taste of Our Times, published in 1954
Raoul Dufy, by Raymond Cogniat, published by Crown Publishers in 1962
Raoul Dufy 1877 — 1953, a catalogue

SBMA CURATORIAL LABELS

The prolific and talented Dufy was a painter, set designer, ceramicist, and printmaker. An encounter with Matisse’s Fauvism in 1905, along with the 1907 Cézanne retrospective at the Salon d'Automne imprinted him early in his career. This large canvas well exemplifies his decorative style, with its high-keyed palette, calligraphic use of line, and playful lexicon of pictograph-like emblems that stand for ideas. The overall surface is animated with an abundance of signs and symbols meant to stand for the bounty of nature, from the strawberries of late summer to the harvesting of wheat and winter vegetables in the fall. The eruption of the harvest at center is enframed by a cascading waterfall to the left and a towering amphitheater made of red bricks to the right, while the sky shifts from clear blue to showers up above. Dufy’s whimsical art lent itself easily to set design, as well as large-scale architectural decorations, for which he enjoyed important public commissions.

- Ridley-Tree Reinstallation, 2022