Exhibition
Raoul Dufy
A passion for colour
In 2022, the Hôtel de Caumont Art Centre will focus on the work of the French painter Raoul Dufy (1877 - 1953). Through more than ninety works, largely from the Musée d’Art Moderne de Paris, and also from French and international public and private collections, discover the artist’s great virtuosity, employing a wide variety of techniques, from oils to watercolour, drawing, engraving and ceramics.
Held in conjunction with the Musée d’Art Moderne de Paris, which holds one of the largest collections of the artist’s works, the exhibition ‘Raoul Dufy: a passion for colour’ explores the artist’s entire career and highlights, in particular, Dufy’s close links with Provence and the works of Paul Cezanne.
Raoul Dufy, who originated from Le Havre, was initially influenced by the Impressionists Claude Monet and Eugène Boudin, and was subsequently influenced by the strong colours and bold lines of Henri Matisse and the Fauves.
It was in 1908, during a trip to the South of France with Georges Braque, that Dufy went to paint at l’Estaque in homage to Cezanne. While Braque adhered to cubism a year later, Dufy continued to study Cezanne’s work until the end of the 1910s. As a result, he developed his own style at the beginning of the 1920s: the independence of colour and line and the simplification of forms in compositions without classical perspective. Seascapes, from Normandy to Provence, were one of the artist’s favourite subjects, combined with the theme of bathing women, regattas and boats. Blue became the predominant, even monochromatic colour in the mid 1920s.
The exhibition presents paintings, drawings, and ceramic articles that depict these themes, as well as Dufy’s highly subtle illustration work—which highlights his talent as a draughtsmanand colourist—in Colette’s Pour un Herbier, André Gide’s Les Nourritures Terrestres (The Fruits of the Earth), Guillaume Apollinaire’s Le Bestiaire, and Vacances Forcées by Roland Dorgelès.
Exhibition organised by the Musée d’Art Moderne in Paris, Paris Musées, in collaboration with Culturespaces.
The team
Curatorship
Sophie Krebs (born 1961) became the General Heritage Curator of the Paris Museum of Modern Art in 1989, where she was the collections manager from 2011 to 2019. She was also curator of Maison de Victor Hugo from 2001 to 2003, for the bicentenary of Hugo’s birth. She has curated a large number of exhibitions and written articles for the following catalogues: Art in Belgium, a point of view (1990), Exact Beauty, 10th-century art in the Netherlands (1992), Sima and the Great Game (1992), The 1930s in Europe: Threatening Times (1997), The School of Paris,1904-1929, the role of the other (2001), Raoul Dufy, the pleasure (2008-2009), Van Dongen, fauve, anarchist, socialite (2011), Albert Marquet, painter of suspended time (2016), Léonard Foujita, life works (2019), Victor Brauner. I am the dream. I am inspiration (2020). She defended her thesis on history and art history (L’École de Paris, une invention de la critique d’art des années 20, The School of Paris, an invention of the art critics of the 1920s) at the Paris Institute of Political Science, supervised by Laurence Bertrand-Dorléac, in 2009, and has penned various articles, notably on the School of Paris. She is currently preparing the publication of her thesis.
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