“Raoul Dufy (1877-1953) is best known today for his brightly colored palette and the joy of his subjects, from which any form of doubt or anxiety is banished. This exhibition invites us to discover his artistic development, from the revelation of Henri Matisse’s Luxe, Calme et Volupté (1904), where the need to conjure up the ‘miracle of the imagination’ became fully apparent to him, to the development of his style in relation to that of Paul Cézanne, and finally the blossoming of his own pictorial language in his studio in Vence in the south of France.

His singular style unfolds throughout the exhibition in landscapes of Normandy and Provence, the motif of the studio, harbor views and bathers, and the musicality of fashionable parties and receptions. And while the artist was first and foremost a painter, he also sought very early on to transpose the recurring motifs of his imagination into book illustration, and superb textile designs and ceramics of the Art Deco period.