Introduction
The Museo Thyssen-Bornemisza holds the first major retrospective on Raoul Dufy in Madrid since the one presented at the Casa de las Alhajas in 1989. The exhibition, which is benefiting from the collaboration of the Comunidad de Madrid, offers a comprehensive survey of the entire career of this French artist through 93 works loaned from private collections and museums, including the Musée d’Art Moderne de la Ville de Paris, the National Gallery of Art, Washington, the Art Institute of Chicago, the Tate, London, and an exceptional loan of 36 works from the Centre Pompidou in Paris. Although principally featuring oil paintings, the exhibition includes drawings and watercolours in addition to textiles and ceramics designed by Dufy during the course of his long and prolific career of more than half a century.
The Museum offers a reassessment of his work that focuses not only on Dufy’s more hedonistic side as the painter of the pleasures of modern life, but also
and primarily on his more introspective, reflexive and personal facet. Juan Ángel López-Manzanares, the exhibition’s curator and a curator at the Museo Thyssen- Bornemisza,
has devised a chronologically ordered structure for the exhibition, which follows the development of Dufy’s painting through four sections: his early work
(From Impressionism to Fauvism); the period when the influence of Cézanne led him towards Cubism (The Constructive Period); his output as a designer of textiles and
ceramics (Decorative Designs); and finally, his mature phase (The Light of Colours).
