Wieneke Archive Book 4g : Art in Brisbane Presscuttings

VOL. V, No. 19 r NSW, OCTOBER 17, 1953 Homage To Dufy B. Denvir IN ARRANGING A large retrospective exhibition of the work of Raoul Dufy at the Musee de I'Art Moderne, its Director. M. Jean Cassou. has rendered homage to the memory of a man who personified all that is most refined, most human and most intelligent in the French genius. In 1952 Dufy had represented France at the Venice Biennale, and so it is good to know that he died secure in the knowledge that his fellow countrymen knew and appreciated his gifts. There has been, amongst those whose interest in contemporary painting is at best superficial, a tendency to dismiss Dufy as a flancur-a brilliant wit whose gloss on contemporary life makes him part decorator, part couturier. It is only in an exhibition of this scale and size that one can fully refute such generalisations, and see Dufy as a serious, an intent artist, with his own contribution to make to the idiom of modern form. Like so many of the giants of French painting, he came from the North. born in Le Havre on June 3, 1872, of Scottish descent. As a schoolboy he met his fellow townsmen Braque and Friesz, and at the age of twenty-three he was awarded a local scholarship and went to Paris to study at the Ecolc des Beaux Arts. Even at this early moment he heard talk about a young painter named Matisse. whose theories were forming a rival dogma to that of Impression- ism. Th4 influence of Matisse chrystallised in Lase. Ciliate et Volupte of 1904-05 about which Maurice Denis wrote: "Luxe, Cake et Volume is the diagram of a theory." Duly thought so too, and several years later wrote of this Matisse masterpiece: "From it I came to understand all the new principles of painting, and Impressionist realism lost its charm for me as I contemplated this miracle of the imagination introduced into design and colour. I immediately understood the new pictorial mechanics." Even in his earliest works he had evinced signs of an absorbed interest in colour and its significance. Now as a convinced naive. and part of the group which included Van Dongen, Vlaminck and Derain. he was learning that colour was constructional as well as descriptive, though in a work like the Atelier of 1907 there is little to suggest the Dufy who was later to emerge as a master of quick, sensitive calligraphic lines, in which the tip of the brush is used almost as an etcher's needle. Instead, thick masses of colour, sturdy firmness of outline. a complete rejection of the ephemeral "camera eye" of Impressionism. The curious thing of course is that in a way Duly was by nature an Impressionist. More than any other of the Fauves he was interested in society-in people moving about, in the motion of crowds, the vivacious spectacle of Epson); Deau- ville and of the Lido. Even his landscapes are. so to speak. humanised landscapes; they are not mere panorama of observed beauty, but the stage for the human comedy. That explains why in 1937 he succeeded so splendidly in translating into his own idiom Renoir's Moulin de la Gillette. For whereas the other Fauves tended for the most part to decora- tive volume, Dufy turned to decorative line, translating light into colour. In the beginning he tended to focus the light in his pictures into the centre, leaving a dark border-as with La Vendeuse de Quatre Saisons (1905). But later as he developed his more personal idiom he reversed the process. and the Marseilles of 1925 which marks an important stage in his development-fades away around three of its edges into the opalescent light of the empyrean. , He was never perplexed and driven on by the compositional exegesis which stimulated Braque, and in terms of the eternal dilemma of French art, he was the child of Watteau rather than of Poussin. The trembling, nervous line suggests the sensitivity of twentieth century man. The nostalgia for the hot sun and hedonism of the Mediterranean indicate the man of the North. The persistent humanism defines the Frenchman. Gallant and creative to the last, despite the rheumatism which crippled him as it had Renoir, he was an artist of whom our century can be proud. FORTNIGHTLY Sixpence FRANCE 30 francs. U.S.A. and CANADA 15 cents JOHN MARTIN (Laing Art Gallery) CHARLES MARTIN PORTRAIT OF THE ARTIST No. 123 wilA T STRANGE CONVULSION seized early nineteenth century England? " How can one explain in term of economics or politics the wild wave of uninhibited frenzy which produced the paranoiac Haydon, the half-mad Blake, the parricide Dadd. the poisoner Wainewright. the religious eccentric Palmer, the neurotic pornographer Fuseli? John Martin was not himself mad-though one of his brothers attempted to set fire to York Minster and another described himself as "The Philosophical Conqueror of All Nations." But his paintings clearly teeter on the edge of insanity, Their very power and compulsion spring from the fact that they inflict a kind of vertigo on the imagination, hinting at vast chasms in the mind of man, creating in paint and canvas the kind of world which Coleridge described in verse. Having commenced as a "serious" historical painter, he very rapidly discovered a formula for success. His works impressed by their acuracy, overwhelmed by their imaginative daring and cajoled by their steady reference to such familiar themes as those displayed in the pages of the Bible or of the works of Milton. Honours and distinctions poured on him. and even the usually insensitive William IV was heard to remark that Martin's paint- ings were "very pretty." There was something encyclopaedic about Martin's genius-he was given to inventing elastic boats and producing schemes for the amelioration of London's servera.., system-and though these do not seem to have dissipated his imaginative powers, they made considerable inroads on his financial security, and in tire middle of his career he went through a period of considerable economic insecurity. NOr, onwards the end of Iris life. was Iris fame so dazzling as it had been at the commencement. But it was after his death that his fortunes sank to their lowest ebb. Art mion was first drawn to his works in the early 'twenties, but even in the 'thirties his paintings were being sold for three or four pounds. The publication of Timms Ralston's authoritative study hr 1946 and the current e.shibition at the Whitechapel Art Gallery mark a more substantial degree of rehabilitati,,n.