Raoul Dufy (designer) for Bianchini Férier (studio)
Pattern Sketch (une maquette)
circa 1918 (?)
Coinciding with and no doubt owing to Raoul Dufy’s close collaborations with Paul Poiret and l’école Martine, each of whom produced sets of prints and designs in particularly bright, fauvist tones, the Lyon-based silk-manufacturing studio Bianchini Férier (founded in the late 1880s and run by Charles Bianchini) also struck close ties with contemporary Dufy. From this blossomed an energetic decade (roughly between the mid 1910s to the late 1920s) of design étiquette that beat proudly from the bosom of France, spurred by both Bianchini’s value of quality and concept and Dufy’s vision of colour, spawning as such creations as seen above. Purely by Dufy’s hand, this maquette resonates with the artist’s take on the character of nature: bold, fantastical and breathtakingly ludicrous. Every petal and stem has an individual pulse; the wet, whip-like strokes of gouache seem to shake with a craving for more colour and more power; and the dainty specks of white and black apparently skip from leaf to leaf, teasing the blood-red backdrop with incessant tickles. Dufy pointedly drew his designs with an intention to scrape away any seriousness associated with ‘high’ art, retaining all the same an aspect of instantly-felt beauty in such elements as colour-coordination, visual texture and seemingly uncontrollable contours. Arguably, each of these details requires an automatic, un-inhibited understanding of ‘self’ and of the immediate in order to experience fully and most truthfully, allowing one to revisit the thrill of Dufy’s pieces with recurring spurts of unchecked, wonderfully unfeigned excitement.
