Raoul Dufy the great exhibition at Palazzo Cipolla in Rome

Until February 26, 2023, the halls of the Palazzo Cipolla in Rome are hosting the first major exhibition ever organized in Italy and dedicated to one of the masters of modern art: Raoul Dufy.

Author of monumental works such as La Fée Electricité, one of the largest paintings in the world, with a total length of 6 meters, made up of 250 panels, Dufy was a great French painter, scenographer and draftsman of the early 20th century. Through his ability to capture atmospheres, colors and the intensity of light and to reproduce them on his canvases, he becomes the painter of joy and light.

Raoul Dufy, life

The artist was born into a family with modest economic conditions. He has an active father as an organist who transmits his passion for music notably to Raoul Dufy, which he cultivates throughout his life, also transposing it into his works. Following a family financial crisis, in 1891 the young Raoul was forced to look for work in Le Havre.

In the extraordinarily stimulating artistic environment of Paris, he became close to two masters of Impressionism such as Monet and Pissarro and in 1905 to Matisse. 1903 was the year of his first participation in the Salon des Indépendants, where he exhibited until 1936, then was accepted in 1906 at the Salon d’Automne. His artistic activity knew no interruptions and, from 1910, he broadened his work in the field of decorative arts with success, establishing himself in a very large production, from wood engraving to painting and graphic design, from ceramics to fabrics, from illustrations to scenographies. With an artistic activity that knew no interruption until his death, all this allowed him to rediscover his luminous palette, to which he superimposed a vibrant and allusive graphic touch.

The Raoul Dufy exhibition. The painter of joy, with more than 160 works

Among the paintings, drawings, ceramics and fabrics of renowned French public and private collections, such as the Musée d’Art Moderne de la Ville de Paris which houses one of the richest collections of Dufy, the Center Pompidou, the Palais Galliera, the Forney Library and the Jacques Doucet Literary Library, the exhibition recounts the life and work of an artist always turned towards modernity, imbued with a liveliness who knew how to adapt to all the decorative arts, contributing to change public taste. Organized by Sophie Krebs, general heritage curator of the Parisian museum, the exhibition is an emotional journey through the artist’s favorite themes, where visual sensations reduced to the essence of reality, the use of composition , light and color are the emblematic elements that characterize his works.

14 thematic sections

The exhibition on Raoul Dufy recounts the entire artistic journey of the French painter, through multiple works that embrace various techniques in the different decades of the 20th century, from the beginning to the 1950s, when Dufy was looking for new themes due to war and disease. which obliges him to stay in his studio in the south of France. An excursus that finds its leitmotif in chromatic violence, in the magic of this color which becomes an essential element in the communication of emotions and moods. A perennial artist in search of stimuli and experimentation, capable of making committed but at the same time apparently “light” art, whose avowed aim was, as the American writer Gertrude Stein writes, to provide pleasure. .