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Raoul Dufy: a passion for colour

From 6 May to 18 September 2022
Hôtel de Caumont - Centre d'Art
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Inès Masset, Claudine Colin Communication
+ 33 (0)1 42 72 60 01
ines@claudinecolin.com

In 2022, the Hôtel de Caumont Art Centre will focus on the work of the French painter Raoul Dufy (1877 - 1953). Presenting more than ninety works, largely from the Musée d’Art Moderne de Paris, and also from French and international public and private collections, the exhibition reflects 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.

Curatorship

Sophie Krebs (born in 1961) has been General Heritage Curator at the Musée d’Art Moderne in Paris since 1989, where she was collections manager from 2011 to 2019. She was also acurator at the Maison de Victor Hugo from 2001 to 2003, during the bicentennial of Hugo’s birth. She has curated many exhibitions and written catalogue articles: L’art en Belgique, un point de vue (1990), La Beauté exacte, l’art aux Pays-Bas au Xe siècle (1992) Sima et le Grand Jeu (1992), Le Temps menaçant, les années Trente en Europe (1997), L’École de Paris, la part de l’autre, 1904-1929 (2001), Raoul Dufy, le plaisir (2008-2009), Van Dongen, fauve anarchiste et mondain (2011), Albert Marquet, peintre du temps suspendu (2016), Léonard Foujita, œuvre d’une vie (2019), and Victor Brauner. Je suis le rêve. Je suis l’inspiration (2020). She defended a thesis on history and art history (L’École de Paris, une invention de la critique d’art des années 20) at the Institut des Sciences Politiques in Paris under the direction of Laurence Bertrand-Dorléac in 2009, and has written many articles, particularly about the School of Paris. She is currently preparing her thesis for publication.

Exhibition organised by the Musée d’Art Moderne in Paris, Paris Musées, in collaboration with Culturespaces.

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Download the press kit
Contact

Inès Masset, Claudine Colin Communication
+ 33 (0)1 42 72 60 01
ines@claudinecolin.com

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