Raoul Dufy retrospective opens in Deauville with 100 works from the Centre Pompidou

Raoul Dufy, Posters at Trouville, 1906. Oil on canvas, 65 x 81 cm. Collection Centre Pompidou, Paris, National Museum of Modern Art - Center for Industrial Creation. Photo: Centre Pompidou, MNAM-CCI/Photographic Documentation Service of the MNAM/ Dist. GrandPalaisRmn.

DEAUVILLE.— A major retrospective devoted to Raoul Dufy has opened at Les Franciscaines in Deauville, bringing together approximately 100 works that reveal an artist whose instantly recognizable paintings represented only one part of a remarkably varied career.

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On view through September 20, 2026, “Raoul Dufy: The Melody of Happiness” is the first exhibition produced through a new partnership between Les Franciscaines and the Centre Pompidou. Drawing extensively from the holdings of the Musée national d’art moderne, the exhibition includes around 60 paintings alongside drawings, prints, ceramics and textile works.

Born in Le Havre in 1877, Dufy became one of the most popular French artists of the first half of the 20th century. His luminous colors, calligraphic lines and images of concerts, regattas, fashionable gatherings and racecourses helped establish a visual language often associated with pleasure and modern leisure.

The Deauville exhibition, however, seeks to move beyond that familiar image. Organized in ten chronological and thematic sections, it traces Dufy’s development from his early Normandy landscapes through Fauvism, his experiments with Cubism and his later work in decorative and applied arts.

The presentation begins with three self-portraits made at different moments in the artist’s career. Their contrasting styles provide an immediate indication of how often Dufy reinvented his visual language.

After training in Le Havre, he initially worked as a landscape painter in the wake of Impressionism. By 1906, he had emerged as an important figure within Fauvism, the movement known for its liberated use of intense, non-naturalistic color.

His artistic experiments continued in 1908, when he worked beside Georges Braque at L’Estaque near Marseille. There, the two painters produced increasingly geometric landscapes that reflected the emergence of Cubism and a new approach to pictorial structure.

During the following decade, Dufy became interested in popular and decorative art, areas that would occupy a central place in his career. The exhibition emphasizes that his sense of rhythm, pattern and ornament moved easily between painting and functional objects.

Beginning in 1924, he collaborated with the Catalan ceramicist Josep Llorens Artigas on a group of vases and earthenware tiles. These works allowed Dufy’s fluid drawing and decorative imagination to move across curved surfaces and architectural formats. His textile designs similarly transformed familiar motifs into repeating arrangements of line and color.

Music provides one of the exhibition’s principal themes. Dufy came from a musical family and remained an informed and passionate listener throughout his life. He repeatedly painted musicians, instruments and concert settings, while also exploring the more abstract relationship between musical rhythm and the organization of color and form.

The exhibition’s title, “The Melody of Happiness,” reflects this connection, but it also points to the sense of animation that runs through much of Dufy’s work. His brushwork and freely drawn contours often seem to move independently of the areas of color beneath them, creating compositions that appear almost improvised.

Normandy is another central presence. Dufy frequently returned to marine landscapes, harbors and coastal life, populating his scenes with allegorical women, horses and other unexpected figures. Deauville itself played an important role in his imagery.

The artist made several visits to the resort town and found considerable success with his paintings of horse racing. Those works captured not only the movement of horses and jockeys but also the spectacle surrounding the racecourse: grandstands, fashionable spectators, flags and the rhythms of modern leisure.

Portraiture receives renewed attention in the exhibition as well. Dufy frequently painted figures connected to artistic and literary circles, approaching portraiture with the same decorative freedom found in his landscapes and interiors.

Among the major examples is a monumental equestrian group portrait commissioned in 1930 by the British Kessler family. The work is regarded as one of Dufy’s most important achievements in the genre.

The retrospective concludes on a more somber note with the “Black Cargo Ships,” the artist’s final series. These paintings return to the port of Le Havre, Dufy’s birthplace, which was almost completely destroyed during the closing stages of the Second World War.

Rather than using black simply to evoke destruction or mourning, Dufy applied it in broad areas to describe the overwhelming brilliance of sunlight. The effect is both physically dazzling and emotionally charged, bringing his lifelong investigation of light and color to an unexpectedly dark conclusion.

Curated by Christian Briend, chief curator and head of modern collections at the Centre Pompidou–Musée national d’art moderne, the exhibition presents Dufy as an artist whose pursuit of beauty and pleasure was accompanied by constant formal experimentation.

By placing paintings beside ceramics, prints and textiles, “The Melody of Happiness” demonstrates how Dufy’s visual language extended beyond the canvas. The exhibition also restores the importance of Normandy, music and decorative art to an understanding of a career too often reduced to its most cheerful and immediately appealing images.