Raoul Dufy, Impressionist and Fauvist
If Dufy has long been discredited, he probably owes it to the apparent lightness of his work.
B
orn in Le Havre in 1877, into a working class household, he has to work from the age of 14 to earn a
living. His job in a coffee importation company doesn’t hold him from following the evening classes of the municipal fine arts school of Le Havre. In 1900, his home town gives him a scholarship that
allows him to join his friend Othon Friez in the national fine arts school of Paris. If the academicism
leaves him indifferent, his first canvasses are close from the work of Boudin or Monet. From this influence, Dufy learns a great lesson of freedom towards the subject. It is at the same time that he begins to
exhibit and meets with the art dealer Berthe Weil.
I
Raoul Dufy, Martigues, 1903, oil on canvas, 44X61 cm,
n 1903, he discovers the south of France in
Martigues. It is likely that Francis Picabia, from
the same generation, and also in touch with
Berthe Weil, was at the origin of this choice.
Indeed, Picabia, who was a great admirer of
the Burgundian painter, Félix Ziem (18211911), whom had set up an art studio in Martigues in 1861, travels regularly to Martigues
since 1899. As a matter of fact, Ziem’s celebrity attracted numerous painters since 1880.
Among them: Auguste Renoir and Paul Signac, who came to paint “Ziem’s Venice”.
Martigues, Ziem Museum.
I
n general, Dufy paints Jonquières’ and l’île’s neighbourhoods, where, seduced by the
picturesque of the city, he realises a series of medium-sized landscapes. These paintings come after several sketches and quickly rendered paintings realised on the spot. These
landscapes have different compositions and framings. The symbolic landscape of his first
travel in the south of France is an oil on canvas belonging to the Ziem Museum entitled
Martigues. In this peaceful view of Jonquières’ neighbourhood, there are recurring themes
of Dufy’s work such as: the harbour, the boats, and the architecture reflecting in the water.
D
uring this travel, Dufy discovers the charms of the South of France, the hustle and bustle of the
markets and cafés, the crowd. The canvases of this period are still marked by the impressionist influence: his touch is thick and divided. However the clarity of the shapes, the acuteness of the descriptions and a pronounced taste for contrasted and rather dark colours, demonstrate the importance of
Manet’s influence, more than any other painter. Dufy’s palette will tend to lighten, under the Mediterranean light.
A
t the “Salon des Indépendants” of 1905,
where he exhibits, Dufy discovers Henri Matisse’s (1869-1954) canvas, Luxe, calme et volupté,
(« Calm and Voluptuous Luxury »), which is an
absolute revelation for him “Facing this canvas
[…], I understood all the new reasons of painting, as
I was contemplating the miracle of imagination introduced in drawing and colour, realism and impressionism lost, for me, all their charms. I understood
immediately the new pictorial mechanism.” Even if
he wasn’t present at the Autumn Salon, in the famous “cage aux fauves” (wild beasts cage), where
Matisse, Derain, Vlaminck and their friends unleashed the comments of the critics, he understands what fauvism offers of freedom and overcoming of the individual initiative. A fundamental
change begins in his productions.
Raoul Dufy, La terrasse sur la plage (the terrace on the
beach), 1907, oil on canvas,
46 x 55 cm, Paris, museum of modern arts of the city of Paris.
F
rom this moment on, Dufy chooses to turn away from impressionism that used to prevail in his first
works, and to employ a new graphic vocabulary. The canvasses realised at that period, show distinctly a release of colours. Dufy dares the most violent contrasts, without ever losing his sense of figuration. The retrospective in tribute to Gauguin in 1906 is also a very important event: he discovers the
use of pure and saturated tints, applied in large areas of plain colour, rejecting at the same time any
sense of perspective.
T
his short period of fauvist experimentations, marks the distance from any realistic representation
of the subject, and also settles down his theory of the colour-light: “I was spontaneously brought
towards what will always be my real preoccupation. I had discovered my system, of which this is the theory:
by following the sunlight, we’re wasting time. The light in paintings, is something else, it’s a distribution and,
an arrangement light, a colour-light”. For Dufy, the colours create the light.