Paris zinc gray? Come on! At the Musée de Montmartre, an eagle's nest from where the ocean of the capital's rooftops is revealed like nowhere else, look at the city through the eyes of Raoul Dufy (1877-1953). This artist had one of his workshops here with his painter friend Othon Friesz. Then he moved permanently a few steps further, towards Pigalle (at 5, impasse Guelma from 1911). In nearly 200 oils, watercolors, engravings, drawings enhanced with gouaches (white left in reserve for an accentuated effect of luminosity and transparency), with a number of documents and some magnificent examples of textile creations, here is Paname madder pink, tender blue or cobalt, violet, lemon yellow, burnt sienna, green for its parks and gardens, its suburbs, vermilion or red cadmium for its densest places ...
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Dufy loved Paris like a child, that is to say immediately and without moderation.
In his bird's-eye views, he arranges the buildings schematically in small squares tight like notes on a score.
From these primitive plans, with perspective folded down as in medieval images, monument-signals without shadow or volume emerge.
This gives these abundances an impression of balance.
To the point that it would be hard to put the hashtag #saccageparis in front of this ideal of a harmonious city.
Light, elegant, fresh like a bouquet of cut flowers in the morning.
Proud like Artaban
"Levitating loafer",
as Didier Schulmann nicely defines it, curator with Saskia Ooms, Dufy seems to have hovered everywhere. In front of the Eiffel Tower, the Sacré-Coeur, the Panthéon, the Invalides, the Opera, the Jardin des Plantes. And again: he chronicled his social evenings, his parties at the Bœuf on the roof, his canoe trips on the Seine and the Marne, his walks in the Bois de Boulogne, the sales at Drouot and even the funeral of President Painlevé ...
We meet him at the entrance.
He is 20 years old.
He is proud like Artaban in
Self-portrait with a soft hat
.
And already devoid of any academic ambition in this other, taken from a private collection, executed a few months later.
In 1902, the legendary painting dealer Berthe Weill was the first to buy a pastel from this young Rastignac who had landed from Le Havre.
This view represents Paris.
And precisely the rue Norvins, epicenter of Montmartre bohemia, avant-garde living environment.
Weill invites him to his exhibitions in his second-hand gallery at 25 avenue Victor-Massé, right between the Butte and the art dealers in rue Laffitte.
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We therefore understand how Dufy was able so quickly to engage with the wild animals, to become Cézannien in the wake of the first retrospective devoted to the latter. And participate in the birth of cubism (
Le Bouquet in the studio on rue Séguier
). Besides, the schools weigh on him just like the theories. At strict angles, he prefers curves and arabesques. They can just as easily be faceted. He lets himself go.
His woodcuts engraved for the collection
Le Bestiaire ou Cortège d'Orphée
, of a beautiful naivety, won him the heart of Apollinaire.
And meeting the famous couturier Paul Poiret stimulates his decorator temperament.
With him, he created a fabric printing company on Boulevard de Clichy.
Three years later, he is in contract with a Lyon silk firm.
For her, her textile creations flourish.
Parisian monuments, always in the same cheerful colors as these oils, become more than patterns, leitmotifs.
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Small blue-white-red flags crown them more and more, the only signs of the harshness of the times and the frustration of having to stay in the back during the First World War. Polyarthritis attacks - the same to which Rubens, Renoir or Paul Klee were subject - forced him to do so. Dufy, however, contributes to the patriotic impulse by carrying out this work as well as explicitly propaganda engravings. In the 1920s and 1930s, this Paris according to Dufy won dresses, contaminated silk squares or restaurant menus.
These colors in flat or in rapid stripes, always fluid and dissociated from the inked line, hit the mark. They will mark the Roaring Twenties. Impasse Guelma, the painter has covered its walls with a bright blue, a metaphor for the exterior. In this space as real as it is mental, Paris concentrates, becomes essential. The windows and facades are, as with Matisse, other paintings. Wallpapers, rugs and curtains are part of the preferred lexicon (for example, they give their tone to
30 years or life in pink
). Finally, the vectors of passions are always highlighted. There, in the foreground, a naked woman posing. Here a palette, a bouquet or a violin.
The Red Violin
,
Blue Quintet
,
Hommage à Bach
and
The Grand Concert
, works of the post-Second World War, mark the rediscovered happiness.
These oils are common at the Musée de Montmartre.
The smallness of the space suits them well, reminding us of where they were born.
Would this meeting be the most beautiful sequence of the course?
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This is because we have not yet discovered the one where the armchairs, chairs, wing chairs, plus a sofa and a screen, loaned from the Mobilier national, are installed.
From 1923, Dufy was approached by the great French manufactures to make tapestry cartons.
Woven, these bouquets adorn the seats while the monuments and districts - Chevaux de Marly, obelisk of Concorde, Louvre or Champs-Élysées with a blue background strewn with small white clouds - adorn the backs.
Even for all the gold in the world, we wouldn't sit on these fireworks decorated with national colors ...
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At the end of the tour, the exhibition presents a preliminary setting to the
Seine, from Paris to the sea
. This monumental triptych (with the recognizable hometown of Le Havre on the left) now adorns the restaurant of the Musée des beaux-arts de Lyon. Originally, it was intended for the wall of the hemicycle of the bar-smoking room of the Théâtre du Palais de Chaillot. And to end this evocation of Dufy, follower of total art, let us mention again, as a reminder of the famous
La Fée Électricité
(600 m2 of plywood panels restored last year and visible at the Museum of Modern Art in Paris), a series of ten lithographs enhanced with gouache.
This resumption on paper, and twenty years later, of the immense decor designed for the International Exhibition of Arts and Techniques of 1937, is due to the engraver Charles Sorlier.
It has only been published 350 copies.
Montmartre Museum until September.
Catalog In Fine, 175 p., € 19.95.
Res .: 01 49 25 89 39. www.museedemontmartre.fr
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