From October 14^th 2022 to February 26^th 2023, the rooms of Palazzo Cipolla hosted the first major exhibition ever held in Italy dedicated to one of the masters of Modern Art: Raoul Dufy (Le Havre, June 3^rd 1877  - Forcalquier, 23 March 23^rd 1953).
The exhibition was promoted by the Fondazione Terzo Pilastro - Internazionale through its  President, Prof. Emmanuele F. M. Emanuele, was created by Poema, with the organizational support of Comediarting and Arthemisia, and was conceived by the Musée d’Art Moderne de la Ville de Paris, Paris Musées. The catalogue was published by Skira.

With over 160 works, including paintings, drawings, ceramics, and fabrics from renowned French public and private collections – such as the Musée d’Art Moderne de Paris (that conserves one of Dufy’s richest collections), the Centre Pompidou, the Palais Galliera, the Bibliothèque Forney, and the Bibliothèque littéraire Jacques Doucet, all in Paris, along with the Musée de la Loire, Musée des Tissus et des Arts Décoratifs in Lyon, the Musée des Beaux-Arts Jules Chéret in Nice, and the Musée Royaux des Beaux-Arts de Belgique in Brussels –  the Raoul Dufy. Il pittore della gioia exhibition narrates the story of the life and works of an artist that has always looked towards modernity, pervaded by a liveliness he was able to adapt to all the decorative arts, contributing to a change in the preferences of his audience.

Curated by Chief Curator Sophie Krebs and Nadia Chalbi, head of the Musée d’Art Moderne de Paris exhibitions and collections, Dufy’s exhibition is an emotional journey through the themes the artist favored most, where visual sensations are reduced to their essence of reality, with the use of composition, light, and color which are the emblematic elements that characterize his art.

Dufy was a great French painter, set designer, and draughtsman from the beginning of the 20^th century, as well as the creator of monumental works, such as La Fée Electricité (The Electricity Fairy, 1937 - 1938, Musée d’Art Moderne de Paris), which is one of the largest paintings in the world, measuring a total of 6 meters and consisting of 250 panels, commissioned by the Compagnie Parisienne de Distribution d’Électricité and exhibited in the Electricity Pavilion at the 1937 International Expo in Paris. With his ability to capture moods, colors and  the intensity of light, and then transfer them to his canvases, Dufy became ? the painter of joy and light par excellence.

The artis grew up in a family who lived in modest economic conditions. His father was an organist who transferred to Raoul, in particular, the same passion he had for music, which he cultivated for the rest of his life, transposing it also to his works.

In 1891, after a family financial crisis, young Raoul was forced to look for work in Le
Havre
In Paris' extraordinarily stimulating artistic environment, he was influenced by two masters of Impressionism: Monet and Pissarro. However, in 1905, through the scandal caused by Fauvism, he discovered a modern style of painting that was popular at the time and that led him to approach Matisse.
1903 was his first time at the Salon des Indépendants (where he exhibited until 1936), and he was also then accepted in 1906 at the Salon d’Automne (until 1943).

 

 

Dufy continued painting, uninterrupted. Then, starting in 1910, he expanded his activity to the field of decorative arts, successfully establishing himself in a rather vast field of production: from engraving to painting and graphics, from ceramics to fabrics, from illustrations to set design. With artistic projects that knew no interruption until his death, all this allowed him to create his dazzling palette, onto which he overlaid his vibrant and allusive graphic touch.
Divided into 13 sections, the exhibition narrated the French painter’s entire artistic career, through multiple works that embrace different techniques from the various decades of the 20th century, up until the 1950s, when Dufy sought new themes due to the war and an illness that forced him to remain in his workshop in the south of France.
Dufy preferred maritime landscapes and particularly loved the racetracks, which ended up being successful for him. Sensitive to the air of his time, he became interested in the entertainment society, with his races, regattas, elite and popular shows that he lively and vivaciously reproduced.
He was an artist who constantly sought stimuli and experimentation, capable of creating art that was both demanding and apparently light, with a stated purpose: that of bringing joy and pleasure, as American writer Gertrude Stein once wrote.
With regard to the exhibition, Prof. Emmanuele F. M. Emanuele, President of the Fondazione Terzo Pilastro -  Internazionale stated: “I am very pleased to host an exhibition on Raoul Dufy in the exhibition space of Palazzo Cipolla, which is presented again in Rome after almost forty years of oblivion.” (ed. The first and only exhibition on Dufy in the capital, before today, was in fact held in 1984 at Villa Medici.) “Often not entirely understood – due to the apparent simplicity of his artistic style, for which he was frequently described as being superficial and frivolous – Raoul Dufy’s preparation was actually articulate and complex. He was initially influenced by Impressionism, masterfully perpetuating the tradition of Monet and counting on his peculiarity of being a ‘colorist by temperament’. He later approached Fauvism, inspired by Matisse, Braque, and Cézanne. As he matured artistically, Dufy’s singularity was found in gradually dissociating colors from the drawing, simplifying as much as possible and, therefore, favoring form to content. Following his own theory that color was used by painters to capture light, he travelled extensively through the Mediterranean, especially in Provence (ed. where he then settled) and Southern Italy. This is where he created his famous landscapes, bathers, and wheat fields, then concert halls, and especially regattas, horse races and racetracks, depicting the society of leisure of the 1920s and 1930s, which made him popular with the public.”