Raoul Dufy, The Color of Modernity

For Raoul Dufy, color did not serve to imitate reality, but to restore its rhythm. "Color has a life of its own" the French painter, one of the protagonists of twentieth-century art, loved to repeat. He transformed the light of the Mediterranean, music, the sea, and popular festivals into a universe of vibrant hues and light lines. Drawing on his experiences as an artist of Impressionism and Fauvism, Dufy developed an unmistakable style in which drawing and color seem to move with surprising autonomy: the contours do not imprison the forms, and the chromatic fields often transcend the limits of the object, giving the paintings a sense of freedom and movement. On the occasion of the 150th anniversary of the artist's birth, the Tokyo Metropolitan Art Museum is dedicating a major retrospective to Dufy, built around the masterpieces preserved at the Musée d'Art Moderne de Paris. The exhibition traces the entire span of his production, from the Norman landscapes of his early work to views of the Mediterranean, from regattas to racecourses, up to the famous musical scenes and decorative works that testify to the artist's extraordinary versatility. Painting, engraving, illustration, textiles, ceramics, and scenography coexist in a journey that reveals an artist capable of transcending the traditional boundaries between the fine and applied arts. The heart of the exhibition, however, is the arrival in Japan of one of the most significant works of his career: the preparatory model for La Fée Électricité, approximately six meters long. It is a 1:10 scale sketch of the monumental frieze created for the Electricity Pavilion. of the 1937 Paris Universal Exhibition. The definitive work, almost sixty meters long and now preserved at the Musée d'Art Moderne de Paris, is considered one of the greatest masterpieces of twentieth-century decorative art. The large preparatory cartoon exhibited in Tokyo allows us to closely follow Dufy's creative process and his ability to transform a seemingly technical theme - the discovery and development of electricity - into a poetic composition permeated by light, energy, and color. The arrival in Japan of some of the most important works from Paris offers the opportunity to rediscover one of the great protagonists of European modernity, capable of transforming painting into an experience of pure light.