La Fée Electricité

Like Fernand Léger, Robert Delaunay, and several other artists, Raoul Dufy was commissioned to paint huge frescoes for the 1937 International Exposition in Paris. His commission was for the slightly curved wall of the entrance to the Pavillon de la Lumière et de l’Électricité (“Pavilion of Light and Electricity”), built by Robert Mallet-Stevens on the Champ de Mars. He abided by the instructions given to him by the electricity company, La Compagnie Parisienne de Distribution d’ Électricité, and told the story of La Fée Électricité (“The Electricity Fairy”), taking inspiration from, amongst other things, Lucretius’s De rerum natura. The composition unfolds across 600 m2, from right to left, on two principal themes: the history of electricity and its applications – from the first observations to the most modern technical applications of it. The upper part is a changing landscape in which the painter has placed some of his favourite subjects: sailing boats, flocks of birds, a threshing machine, and a Bastille-day ball. Stretching the length of the lower half are portraits of one hundred and ten scientists and inventors who contributed to the development of electricity.

Dufy blends mythology and allegories with historical accuracy and technological description, setting up contrasts of opposites. In the centre: the Olympian gods and the Ivry-sur-Seine power-station generators connected by Zeus’s thunderbolt; primordial nature and architecture; people at their daily work and modern machines. Immediately to the left of the centre: Iris, messenger of the gods and daughter of Electra, flies in the light, over an orchestra and the capitals of the world, diffusing all the colours of the rainbow. Areas of red, blue, yellow, and green, independent of the flowing line of the drawing, organise and energise this virtuoso composition.

The method Dufy used meant that he could work very quickly (it was finished in 10 months). He used a medium prepared by chemist Jacques Maroger, which gave the paint a transparent quality, like watercolour. This apparent facility actually concealed a great deal of technical innovation, documentary research and solid work (he painted models nude and then in costumes, transferred drawings onto tracing paper in order to work out how to group them, then projected them life-size onto the panels with a magic lantern).

This huge fresco was donated to the Musée d’Art Moderne by Électricité de France and installed in 1964.

Discover the new website dedicated to La Fée Electricité : https://fee.mam.paris.fr/?lang=en

Biography

(1877-1953)

Raoul Dufy exhibited for the first time at the Salon des Artistes Français, in 1901. Two years later, he took part in a group exhibition at Berthe Weill’s new gallery in Montmartre and had regular exhibitions there over the following years. That same year, he also took part in the Salon des Indépendants, where he was noticed by critics as a “natural colourist”. He met Georges Braque at the Salon and, in 1906, along with Derain, Manguin, Matisse and others, he took part in the Cercle de l’Art moderne (Modern Art Club) exhibition organised by Emile Othon Friesz in Le Havre.

His first retrospective was in 1921 at the Galerie Bernheim-Jeune, but he had to wait until 1932 before one of his paintings entered a national collection. Paddock at Deauville was bought for the Musée du Luxembourg, Paris, by Les Amis des Artistes Vivants (Friends of Living Artists).

In 1936, he received two large commissions for the 1937 Exposition Internationale des Arts et Techniques dans la Vie Moderne (International Exposition dedicated to Art and Technology in Modern Life): in June – with Friesz –, one for the smokers’ bar at the new Théâtre du Palais de Chaillot, and one for the decoration of the Pavilion of Light and Electricity, built by Mallet-Stevens on the Champ de Mars. Dufy’s programme was “to promote the role of electricity in national life” and it was based on the great adventure of electricity, from classical times to its 20th century scientific applications. At the heart of the project was the electric power station of Ivry sur Seine crowned by the Olympian gods. This huge fresco, entitled La Fée électricité, was donated to the Musée d’Art Moderne by Électricité de France in 1964.

In 1952, Raoul Dufy represented France at the 26th Venice Biennale, where he won the prize. This was followed by his first retrospective at the Musée d’Art et d’Histoire, Geneva.

Raoul Dufy had suffered from polyarthritis since 1937; he died of the illness on 25 March 1953, at the age of 75.

La Fée Electricité Raoul Dufy

La Fée électricité

La Fée Electricité, 1937

La Fée Electricité, 1937

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