In a unique exhibition, the Montmartre museum examines the particular vision that Raoul Dufy gives to see Paris in his work, often with views from above of a city dotted with monuments. Ready for two months, it finally opens its doors on May 19.
This exhibition on Raoul Dufy (1877-1953) and Paris is a first, underline the curators. “Even if he traveled a lot, Dufy lived all his adult life in Paris and he inscribed Paris in his painting. But we realized that he is not at all spotted as being an artist. of the Parisian landscape. He has a very unique, very modern vision of this landscape. Yet we cannot say that it lacks visibility. There are on average three Dufy exhibitions per year in the four corners of the planet. ‘The Far East and America love it. We thought there was something to show “, explains Didier Schulmann, former curator at the Musée national d’art moderne-Center Pompidou and co-curator of the exhibition.
In 1902, Raoul Dufy painted Paris in a small painting from the heights of Montmartre. Influenced by the Impressionists, it is not yet the Dufy that we will know later. Dufy would become Dufy at the dawn of the 1920s, when he began to dissociate form and color. Trace the design in ink or brush, spreading the paint over it in pure, cheerful tones. But this view announces the panoramas that it will create later. Already, in the distance, the very young Eiffel Tower rises in the landscape.
Opposite, a self-portrait with a hat shows us the young man in a very academic position. It is 1899 and Dufy, who grew up in Le Havre, has just arrived in Paris. He moved from studio to studio, and spent a moment at 12 rue Cortot, address of the current Montmartre museum. In this first room, another self-portrait dating at least from the 1920s, freer, with a more fluid touch, with wavy hair, and a free interpretation of the A ball at the Moulin de la Galette de Renoir show us how far we have come since the arrival of the young artist from Le Havre.
A section makes a detour through the workshop, “recurring in Dufy’s work”, underlines Saskia Ooms, responsible for conservation of the Montmartre museum and co-curator. The artist occupied several of them in Paris before settling in that of the impasse Guelma, at the foot of the Butte Montmartre, which he will keep until the end of his life. “For him, the studio is an allegory of painting, he paints it without anyone, it is an evocation of the creation of the work”, explains Saskia Ooms. In The workshop of the impasse Guelma (1935-1952) he drew a palette of a few lines, placed on a pedestal table in front of a wide open window. The plans merge, interior, exterior, the ground and the back wall. On the back wall hangs a picture with a violin.
Several works shown in the exhibition evoke Dufy’s taste for music. Born into a family of musicians and musician himself, he has entered Parisian concerts and orchestral rehearsals thanks to his brother, director of Courrier musical. “Very early on, he became interested in synesthesia (a gift that allows one to experience several senses at the same time, editor’s note), while remaining figurative”, and he imagines “colors that could evoke the sound of great musicians like Bach”, says Saskia Ooms.
In the studio at Impasse Guelm, Dufy paints sculptural nudes, the color of the flesh of which contrasts with the cold blue of the walls. “The nude for him is above all a formal conception”, underlines the commissioner. “The model is almost like a piece of furniture that is part of the workshop”.
At the center of the exhibition, we discover an exceptional set of furniture, the Paris fair, upholstered by Raoul Dufy. Since his meeting with the couturier Paul Poiret in 1909, for whom he creates fabrics, Dufy has been interested in the decorative arts. In 1923 he was chosen to make tapestry cartoons on the theme of Paris, which were to be used to garnish the seats, a sofa and a screen. They will be executed by the Beauvais factory. A project that will occupy him for ten years. In an explosion of dazzling colors, reds, pinks, greens and against a background of exuberant roses, he sets up the monuments of Paris: the Eiffel Tower, the Arc de Triomphe, the Champs-Elysées, the statue of the Republic.
The masterpiece of this series is the screen which offers an aerial panorama of the city. In the foreground, an Eiffel Tower, almost alive, dominates the landscape, a carpet of roses at its feet. The buildings are tight as in the old plans, with a monument emerging here and there. This vision borrows from the view from a hot air balloon, fashionable at the time, from military photos of the First War, which Dufy certainly observed, and from the aerial photographs of Nadar, the first in history.
This vision of the capital seen from above, with its monuments from the front, runs through Dufy’s work. It can be found in two tapestries from the 1930s exceptionally brought together in the exhibition, a restaurant’s guest book, gouaches, a poster for the planetarium of the Palais de la Découverte …
These elements of an urban view can be found in The Electricity Fairy. Commissioned from Dufy by the Parisian Electricity Distribution Company for the 1937 international exhibition, it remains the largest painting in the world: 600 m2 in 250 panels that tell the story of electricity. The immense fresco, conceived as an ephemeral work, remained stored in a hangar and was able to be reinstalled at the Museum of Modern Art in Paris in 1964. It was of course not moved to the Musée de Montmartre but the exhibition shows a reduced version of 6 m2, ordered by EDF from the publisher Pierre Berès in the form of ten lithographs made from photographs of the original panels.
Raoul Dufy was not very satisfied with the result. The version kept at the Center Pompidou and shown there is the only one that he himself retouched, transformed and enhanced with gouache. The work appears like a kind of fireworks display that mixes urban views dotted with monuments (we can guess the head of the Eiffel Tower emerging from the city) and bucolic views in which he has represented scientists and inventors who participated closely or from afar to the birth of electricity.
“The Paris of Dufy”
Montmartre Museum
12, rue Cortot, 75018 Paris
Every day, from 10 a.m. to 6 p.m. from October to March, from 10 a.m. to 7 p.m. from April to September
Prices: € 13, 18-25 years old: € 10, people with reduced mobility: € 10, 10-17 years old: € 7. Free for children under 10 years old. Teacher rate: 10 €
May 19 to fall (dates not yet specified)
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