Raoul Dufy

Le Havre and the night class, 1877–1900

Raoul Dufy was born on 3 June 1877 in Le Havre, the Normandy port city, the second of eleven children. His father, Léon Marius Dufy, kept the books for a steel manufacturer and was a serious amateur musician, and music stayed with Dufy as a subject all his life. At fourteen he left school to work for a company that imported coffee through the port. In 1895, at eighteen, he began taking evening classes at Le Havre's municipal art school under Charles Lhuillier, who had trained with the portrait painter Jean-Auguste-Dominique Ingres.

Two fellow students in that class, Othon Friesz and Raimond Lecourt, became lifelong friends, and Dufy later shared a studio with Friesz in Montmartre. His work in these years was mostly Norman landscape in watercolour. After a year of military service he won a scholarship in 1900 to the École nationale supérieure des Beaux-Arts in Paris, where Friesz was also studying and where Georges Braque, another Le Havre painter, overlapped with them.

First exhibitions and the turn to Fauvism, 1901–1909

Dufy showed publicly for the first time in 1901 and exhibited at the Salon des Indépendants in 1903. The dealer Berthe Weill took his work into her gallery from 1902, and the painter Maurice Denis bought one of his canvases, an early sign that other artists were watching him. His painting at this point was in the line of Claude Monet and Camille Pissarro, and he worked the beaches near Le Havre, particularly at Sainte-Adresse, which Monet and Eugène Boudin had already made famous.

The decisive picture was somebody else's. At the 1905 Salon des Indépendants, Dufy saw Henri Matisse's Luxe, calme et volupté and turned toward the group the critics had just nicknamed the Fauves, the wild beasts, for their unmixed colour and hard outlines. He painted in that manner until about 1909, producing pictures such as Street Decked with Flags of 1906, a Bastille Day street in Le Havre reduced to blocks of flag colour. Contact with the work of Paul Cézanne then pulled him toward a more structured, subdued handling, and he painted alongside Braque at L'Estaque in 1908.

Poiret, Bianchini-Férier, and the fabric years, 1909–1930

In 1909 the couturier Paul Poiret commissioned Dufy to design the fashion house's printed stationery, and the two went on working together for years. Dufy set up a small woodblock printing operation with Poiret's backing, cutting his own blocks to print fabric directly. From 1912 he was under contract to Bianchini-Férier, the Lyon silk manufacturer, and for roughly the next twenty years his patterns were woven and printed into dress silks that Poiret and the shirtmaker Charvet made up into garments.

The commercial work was not a sideline he tolerated for the money. Dufy's drawing was already flat, graphic and decorative, and it suited cloth better than most easel painting does. He also cut woodblocks for books, most famously the illustrations for Guillaume Apollinaire's Le Bestiaire ou Cortège d'Orphée in 1911, and his plates later appeared in books by Stéphane Mallarmé and André Gide. Tapestry, ceramics and stage sets followed.

The stenographic style, 1920–1940

After a period working through Cubism, Dufy arrived around 1920 at the method that made his name. He drew a rapid, skeletal structure in line and used a steeply foreshortened perspective. Then he laid thin, fast washes of colour over the drawing without matching the two exactly, so that a blue might run past the edge of the boat it belongs to. Critics called it stenographic, after shorthand writing. It let him paint quickly and made the finished picture look like something caught in passing.

The subjects were the pleasures of the interwar rich, painted without complaint or comment: yacht races at Cowes and Deauville, horses at Epsom and Longchamp, orchestras, the harbour at Nice and the promenade along the French Riviera. Regatta at Cowes of 1934 is the type of the thing, a crowded sea of sails and flags in a handful of colours.

His largest commission came from the electricity utility for the 1937 Exposition Internationale in Paris. La Fée Electricité, the Electricity Fairy, is painted in oil on plywood panels and covers about six hundred square metres, which made it one of the largest paintings in the world at the time. It runs the history of electric power from the Greek philosophers to the modern power station, with more than a hundred figures of scientists and inventors along the way. It now hangs in the Musée d'Art Moderne de Paris.

Arthritis, Boston, and death, 1940–1953

Rheumatoid arthritis crippled Dufy's hands in the 1940s. By 1950 he could not hold a brush and had it strapped to his hand so that he could keep working. In April of that year he travelled to Boston for an experimental course of cortisone and corticotropin, drugs newly developed from the research of Philip S. Hench, and the treatment worked well enough that he dedicated several later paintings to the American doctors and researchers who gave it to him.

He exhibited at the Salon des Tuileries in Paris in the late 1940s and early 1950s, and in 1952 he won the grand prize for painting at the 26th Venice Biennale. Raoul Dufy died on 23 March 1953 at Forcalquier, in Provence, aged 75. The cause was intestinal bleeding, which is thought to have been a consequence of the long drug treatment that had given him back the use of his hands. He was buried in the monastery cemetery at Cimiez, above Nice, close to the grave of Matisse.

How Dufy worked

Dufy separated drawing from colour and refused to reconcile them. Most painters make the colour sit inside the drawn shape. He laid down a quick line drawing, then washed colour across it in broad areas that ignore the outlines, so the eye assembles the picture from two layers that do not quite agree. He had noticed that a child's eye registers a colour before it registers the object, and built the method on that.

He also worked in what he called tonal colour, keeping a single dominant hue across a canvas, most often the deep marine blue now sold under his name as Dufy blue. He painted fast and repeated his subjects often, sometimes making dozens of versions of the same regatta or orchestra. The habit is why his work is easy to recognise and, for some critics, easy to undervalue.

Reception and changing reputation

Dufy has always sold well and has often been ranked below the painters he came up with. The charge is that the work is decorative, repetitive and untroubled, made for a pleasant wall rather than an argument, and that the fabric and ceramic commissions confirm it. The defence is that he set out to do something specific with colour and light and did it consistently for thirty years, and that the cheerfulness is a choice rather than a limit.

His standing rose in the second half of his life. The Venice Biennale prize in 1952 came a year before his death, and major retrospectives followed at the Musée d'Art Moderne de Paris and, in 1983, at the Hayward Gallery in London. His paintings are held by the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Museum of Modern Art, the Centre Pompidou, the Art Institute of Chicago and the National Gallery of Art in Washington. His textile designs are now collected as design history in their own right.