Raoul Dufy was born on June 3, 1877, in Le Havre. While working in an import-export company where he could see the sea and the mystery of ships sailing towards the horizon, he attended evening classes at the municipal school of Fine Arts. At the dawn of the 20th century, he found himself in Paris and quickly exhibited, notably at the Salon des Indรฉpendants.
The Jean Cocteau Museum in Menton pays tribute to Raoul Dufy through an exhibition on this versatile artist; much like Jean Cocteau, the two men could only meet and appreciate each other.
Raoul Dufy, Fauvist, Cubist, in any case resolutely modern, distanced himself from academicism as early as 1905. Dufy: painter? Watercolorist? Ceramicist? Milliner? It is impossible to categorize him due to the vast and eclectic nature of his genius. He has been defined as the painter of pleasure. It was his numerous encounters that led him to create. Fabrics, an entire adventure where fashion and its great names like Schiaparelli collaborated with him. He created designs on fabric, and Paul Poiret commissioned hand-painted draperies from him. Portraits of Berthe Weill, including one in Figaro on November 2, 1945.
Raoul Dufy is an artist with themes: the sea, music, naiads, landscapes. Dufy reversed the rule: contours and coloring, it’s quite the opposite; the colors define the contours. With him, we are certainly among the modernists, attempting to escape the constraints of the canvas and its frame. The Electricity Fairy is probably the most beautiful ‘comic book’ ever drawn.
The exhibition shows us 10 paintings where the reading begins at the center and stretches as if to an infinity to the left and right. Horses are also a passion of Dufy; the Nice racecourse shows the public, the jockeys, and the horses. Who will win? It doesn’t matter; we are in Nice, by the sea, and drenched in sunlight. With the flowers, we find ourselves in a garden, perhaps the extraordinary one of Trenet.
After all, Dufy is himself extraordinary. The Russian ballets of Diaghilev, Darius Milhaud, The Ox on the Roof, Apollinaire’s bestiary illustrated by Dufy. Through this exhibition, we explore the artists who stayed on the French Riviera, Dufy’s relationships, his many travels, his versatility, the painter, the ceramicist, the illustrator, the watercolorist, and the fashion designer.
The Cocteau Museum in Menton is the ideal setting for this exhibition. The two great creative artists of the 20th century abolished the boundaries of art. One can be just as much a painter as a sculptor, a fashion designer, or a ceramicist. Poetry is a way of expressing the arts.
If in Cocteau it reaches the absolute, in Dufy it expresses virtuosity. The entire interest of this exhibition is this journey offered to the public in the heart of the 20th century with all its upheavals and especially all this artistic creativity whose extent and consequences we have not finished discovering.
The Cocteau Museum is specific in this sense, it challenges the usual codes with relevant themes. One does not come to admire artworks as in a pinacotheca, but to question oneself in relation to the artist’s message, which always challenges us.
Thierry Jan
