Jean DUFY dancing
Jean DUFY
"Dancing" Oil on canvas 46x65 cm Signed lower right "Jean Dufy"
About the artist
Jean Jacques Gustave Dufy was born in Le Havre, at no.15 rue de l'Esperance, on March 12, 1888, seventh of eleven children (Raoul is the second) to Léon Marius Dufy, accountant in a metalworking company, talented amateur musician , and his wife born Marie Eugénie Ida Lemonnier, native of Honfleur. He studied at the Saint-Joseph College in Le Havre before being placed in a house importing products from overseas and then becoming secretary on the transatlantic La Savoie. After his military service (1910-1912), he moved to Paris where he met André Derain, Georges Braque, Pablo Picasso, Émile Othon Friesz, Albert Marquet and Guillaume Apollinaire. In his first watercolors, exhibited at Berthe Weill's gallery in 1914, muted tones, browns, blues, dark reds, rub shoulders with the hatching technique inherited from Cézanne through the work of his brother Raoul Dufy. Mobilized, after this first exhibition, from August 2, 1914, he was assigned to the 24th Infantry Regiment as an ambulance driver and took part in the Battle of Charleroi. He is then poured into the artillery where he is a battery cyclist. He joined the 103rd Heavy Artillery Regiment in 19176. The war did not prevent Jean Dufy from continuing to paint or draw on notebooks, mainly flowers, horses, landscapes of the Argonne6. He also draws and paints views of the Val d'Ajol, which he discovers in the Vosges, where, ill, he stays on his return from the First World War. From 1916 to 1934 (in December 1922, he married Ismérie Coutut, daughter of confectioners from Preuilly-sur-Claise, a village where the couple stayed frequently until 19484), Jean produced, for Théodore Haviland porcelain from Limoges "very decorative, combining elegance and dreamlike - floral and animal nature - which earned him, at the International Exhibition of Modern Decorative and Industrial Arts in 1925, a gold medal for the “Châteaux de France” service. In 1920, he moved to 2, square Caulaincourt and worked alongside his brother Raoul on the sets for Le Bœuf sur le toit, a musical work by Darius Milhaud based on an argument by Jean Cocteau premiered on February 21, 1920 at the Comédie des Champs-Élysées . His works are shown in broad daylight during successive exhibitions in Paris (Salon d'Automne at the Grand Palais des Champs-Élysées in 1920, 1923, 1924, 1927 and 1932, Galerie Bing & Cie in 1929) and in New York (Balzac Galleries in 1930, Perls Galleries in 1938). In 1936-1937, he was installed at 12 rue Cortot, in André Utter's studio before occupying at the Villa des Arts, 15 rue Hégésippe-Moreau, the studio which was then taken over by Andrés Segovia. For the Universal Exhibition of 1937, the general manager of the Compagnie Parisienne de Distribution d'Électricité asked his brother, Raoul Dufy, to carry out the decoration of the electricity pavilion entrusted to the architect Robert Mallet-Stevens. Jean helps him to create a vast fresco in the glory of electricity, on an area of six hundred square meters: La Fée Électricité. Celebrated for the work, Raoul makes no public citation of his younger brother's contribution, which definitely distances them from each other. Recognized painter, regularly exhibited in Paris and in the United States, integrated into the collections of the most prestigious American museums such as the Art Institute of Chicago or the Museum of Modern Art in New York, Jean Dufy died on May 12, 1964 ( two months after his wife Ismérie) in La Boissière, a hamlet in the village of Boussay (Indre-et-Loire) where he had settled in 1948.