Between
17 February and 17 May 2015 the Museo Thyssen- Bornemisza will be holding the
first major retrospective on Raoul Dufy in Madrid since the one presented at
the Casa de las Alhajas in 1989. The exhibition, which is benefiting from the
collaboration of the Comunidad de Madrid, will offer a comprehensive survey of
the entire career of this French artist through 93 works loaned from private
collections and museums, including the Musée d’Art Moderne de la Ville de
Paris, the National Gallery of Art, Washington, the Art Institute of Chicago,
the Tate, London, and an exceptional loan of 36 works f rom the Centre Pompidou
in Paris.
Although
principally featuring oil paintings, the exhibition will also include drawings
and watercolor s in addition to textiles and ceramics designed by Dufy during
the course of his long and prolific career of more than half a century.
Raoul
Dufy’s work possesses a complexity that has frequently gone unnoticed. His
popular scenes of regattas and horse races meant that by the late 1920s critics
and art historians already referred to his work as essentially agreeable and
light-hearted. Without ignoring the existence of an undeniably hedonistic facet
in his work, the present exhibition moves away from this interpretation in
order to reveal the slow evolution of the artist’s particular language, his
ongoing quest for new visual solutions and above all, his more introspective
side.
Juan Ángel López-Manzanares, the exhibition’s
curator and a curator at the Museo Thyssen- Bornemisza, has devised a
chronologically ordered structure for the exhibition, which follows the
development of Dufy’s painting through four sections: his early work (From
Impressionism to Fauvism); the period when the influence of Cézanne led him towards
Cubism (The Constructive Period); his output as a designer of textiles and
ceramics (Decorative Designs); and finally, his mature phase (The Light of Colors).
Still Life with White Tower , 1913-1947 . Centre Pompidou, Musée
national d'art moderne/Centre de création industrielle
The
exhibition opens with the animated scenes of harbours and markets that Dufy
painted in Normandy, as well as in Marseilles and Martigues when he visited the
Midi in 1903. In 1905 he moved away from these subjects, gradually lightening
his palette and loosening his brushstroke in order to depict scenes of leisure
activities in bright sunlight.
While
Dufy acknowledged his debt to Impressionism, he soon appreciated the need to go
beyond it. He recounted how, when painting on the beach at Sainte-Adresse, he
realised the impossibility of capturing the continuous changes of light: “This
method of copying nature led me towards the infinite, towards meanders, towards
the smallest and most fleeting details. And I was left out of the painting.”
While
Monet, Sisley and Pissarro had aimed to capture the impressions of the retina
on the ir canvases, the new generation of artists aspired to something more
than mere visual satisfactio n. Dufy was impressed by Matisse’s paintings at
the 1905 Salon des Indépendants. This discovery led him to change direct ion in
his work: “[...] for me Impressionist realism lost all its ch arms when I saw the
miracle of imagination introduced into drawing and color . I suddenly grasped
the new mechanic of painting.”
During
the summer of 1906 Dufy fully assimilated the Fauve idiom. In his views of the
beach at Sainte-Adresse and of the port
and streets of Le Havre decorated with
flags for the 14th
of July, Dufy gradually
abandoned a vibrating brushstroke in order to convey the light through broad
zones of color . His palette became more intense and he abandoned the use of
black shadows, replacing them with blue and mauve tones. The aim was no longer
to faithfully reproduce exterior reality but to offer a lyrical interpretation
of nature in order to arouse emotions through color .
The
Constructive Period
Like
many artists of his day, Dufy was profoundly moved by the paintings by Paul
Cézanne that he saw in the Salon d’Automne and at the Bernheim- Jeune gallery
in Paris in 1907. Cézanne’s influence is evident in the orthogonal lines and
simplified forms of Boats in Martigues (1907-1908) and in the canvases that
Dufy painted in L’Estaque during the summer of 1908 in the company of Georges Braque.
Boats
and Barques in Martigues , 1907-1908. Private Collection, France July 14 in Le
Havre, 1906. National Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C. Collection of Mr. and Mrs.
Paul Mellon
The
latter reveal the use of much more geometrical forms, a limited color range and the use of a Cézanne-like
constructive brushstroke. In contrast to Braque, however, Dufy did not pursue
the path of Cubism but rather experimented with his own language while reviving
his earlier interest in color, as evident in one of the most notable works of
this period,
The Large Bather (1914).
This
section presents for the first time a selection of the drawings that Dufy
produced for Apollinaire’s Bestiary or the Parade of Orpheus, considered one
of the first masterpieces of the livre d’artiste . Combining pagan and
Christian motifs, the illustrations that Dufy produced for this text are
inspired by Medieval and Renaissance works and assist the reader in understanding
the essential meaning of Apollinaire’s poetic.
Dufy had already proved himself
a skilled printmaker with his first woodcuts of 1907-1908, a technique that
Apollinaire considered particularly appropriate for accompanying the quatrains
and five- and six-line stanzas in which the Bestiary (his first book of verse)
is written. This selection of drawings loaned by the Centre Pompidou allows
visitors to appreciate the highly meditated process of the book’s creation
while also offering a close-up insight into the working process of a great
draughtsman possessed of an impressively secure line and decorative facility.
Decorative
Designs
Dufy’s illustrations and prints were the forerunners of a new creative
adventure on which he embarked in 1909 when he met the fashion designer Paul
Poiret, then later signed a contract with the Bianchini-Férier textile company
which lasted from 1912 to 1928.
For
Dufy, textile design was a continuation of his experiences with printmaking as
well as a field for free experimentation with color . His initial designs reminiscent
of his prints gave way to floral and animal patterns in which he liberated
himself from his constructivist aesthetic and rediscovered the decorative
fantasy that was innate to his artistic personality. From 1924 onwards, Dufy
also focused on ceramics. Working with Llorens Artigas, he decorated jugs and
tiles wi h sinuous designs of bathers, animals and shells. In the so-called Salon
Gardens (co-designed with Artigas and the Catalan architect Nicolau María
Rubió) reality and fiction combine in the form of original planters for bonsais
that evoke different types of traditional western gardens.
The Peacock illustration in The
Bestiary, or Procession of Orpheus, by Guillaume Apollinaire, 1910-1911. Centre
Pompidou, Musée national d'art moderne/Centre de création industrielle,
The
Light of Colors
Dufy
regularly visited the south of France after the end of World War I. Inspired by
the serene nature and landscape of Provence, he aimed to imbue his work with a
new classical harmony. In addition to the sculptural forms of the landscape,
the light of the Mediterranean was now a key element in his painting: “The unchanging
light of the Mediterranean naturally produces that calm, that classical
serenity which is so different to the fleeting effects which the Atlantic or
the Channel give to landscapes.”
In
his landscapes Dufy thus aimed to reach a synthesis between the splendour of
nature and the pleasure of painting outdoors on the one hand, and on the other
a desire to establish a strictly visual order associated with his subsequent
reflections in the studio. In order to achieve this he structured his landscapes
into chromatic strips, organising the highlights and shadows through the light
emanating from the colors themselves: “To follow sunlight is to waste t me.
The light of painting is something else, it is a light of distribution,
composition, a light-color .”
Furthermore,
Dufy’s previous experience with printmaking and with gouache textile designs
enabled him to separate the color of the figures and objects from their outlines.
A duality between exterior and interior is also evident in the artist’s
numerous views of open windows and balconies, such as
Open Window, Nice (1928),
Window onto the Promenade des Anglais,
Nice (1938),
and The Studio at L’Impasse Guelma (1935-1952).
In
these works Dufy followed Matisse when establishing a complex equilibrium
between the illusionistic transparency of the glass and the opaque surface of
the painting.
Time and its representation are also present in Dufy’s mature
work. For the artist, painting should represent not just the visible but also
an accumulation of recollections, traditions and experiences associated with a
specific place.
His
depictions of the modern world thus often include allegorical or mythological elements
and classical buildings. This is the case with
Port with a Sailboat. Homage to Claude Lorrain (1935)
in which Dufy
depicts the Colosseum next to an idealised port that recalls both Marseilles
and the landscapes by the 17th-century French painter.
In the last years of his
life most of Dufy’s work, by this date of a more intimate character, focused on
music. The musical environment in which he grew up in Le Havre explains his
profound love for this discipline, leading him to seek out visual equivalent s to
musical sounds throughout his career. One example is
Still Life with Violin. Homage to Bach Centre Pompidou, Musée national d'art moderne/Centre de
création industrie lle, Paris (1952),
in
which the artist makes use of both a sinuous stroke that strongly suggests
musical notation and the power of the colorred to evoke the sound of that instrument.
Sainte-Adresse:
The Black Freighter , 1951. Private collection, Bremen. Courtesy Thomas Salis,
Salzburg
Black
becomes more important in his late depictions of bullfights and in particular
in his series The Black Cargo Boat . This subject, which he had first depicted
in 1925, returns in a series executed between 1946 and 1953 in which Dufy once
again made use of black to covey the maximum degree of luminosity. While Dufy
did not aim to make his painting the expression of his emotions, this series
can be interpreted as the presentiment of his imminent death.
