Partly because France surrendered to the Nazis before any harm could be done to Paris, Paris is the art capital of the world. Consequently, it has an impractically large number of great museums. Tourists can’t reasonably be expected to visit all of them—Paris has a dozen or so museums dedicated just to modern art. So, when tourists want modern art, they go to the two center-piece modern art museums—the Musee D’Orsay and the Centre Pompidou. Each gets about three and half million visitors a year. In contrast, the dully-named City of Paris Museum of Modern Art gets about 700 thousand visitors a year. That’s about 50,000 fewer than the Minneapolis Institute of Art.
Despite having been regulated to second-class status, tourism-wise, the City of Paris Modern Art Museum contains what is arguably the single most interesting room in any museum in Paris: the Room Dufy.
The Room Dufy is a room large and triangular, with rounded points and about 600 square feet of floor space. The museum’s website, rather depressingly, says it can host dinner for 50. The walls are 30 feet high and made-up of 250 panels, all painted by Raoul Dufy. Dufy was perhaps the greatest colorist who ever lived, and the room is a shiver and silence-inducing explosion of color.
The painting is called “La Fée Électicité”—”The Electricity Fairy. It was commissioned for the “Pavilion of Light and Electricity” at the 1937 International Exposition in Paris. The Paris Electricity-Distribution Company asked Dufy to “highlight the role of electricity in national life and identity, and—in particular—the vital social role played by electric light.”
What Dufy did was paint a great, festive meeting of 110 of histories greatest scientists and thinkers—the giants upon whose shoulders stood the man who screwed in the first lightbulb. Samuel Morse, Thomas Edison, Alexander Gehaman Bell, Faraday, Ampere, Watt, Hertz, Joule, Volta, Benjamin Franklin, Issac Newton, Pascal, Leibniz, Mendeleev, Goethe, Galileo, Leonardo, Aristotle, and about 90 others. They stand, chatting, against backgrounds of giant industrial construction, steamships, eclectic-lighted boulevards—and pastoral scenes, as a counterpoint. In the center—at the apex of the roughly-v shaped painting—sits Zeus, with his thunderbolts, above a giant generator in a giant power plant.
It’s a fascinating montage—1000 things going on at once, and they all fit together perfectly. But it isn’t the content that makes the painting interesting. It’s the explosive colors.
Photographs can’t do their luminesce justice—the yellow-greens mixed with pure, vermillion reds, purples and blues balanced against each other, streaks of rusty orange and golden orange-yellow. Dufy prepared the colors in a special paint suspension he developed with chemist Jacques Maroger. Maroger was the director of the Louvre’s in-house laboratory, and one of the world’s leading experts on the technical side of paint. (He was also a fine painter himself.) Together Maroger and Dufy developed a sort of oil-water color, which Dufy applied over figures drawn in ink, on plywood.
What Dufy ended up with was a room which, for sheer polychromatic beauty, can compete with the stained-glass-walled Sainte-Chapelle (often considered the most beautiful room in the world). And perhaps the most interesting thing about the Room Dufy is that there never seems to be anyone there. The Louvre and the Orsay are stuffed to capacity with indifferent mobs. La Fée Électicité enjoys monastic peace and quiet—which makes the giant, explosive painting that much more tremendous.
The Musée d’Art Moderne de la Ville de Paris is housed in the east wing of the Palais de Tokyo, near the Trocadero, in the shadow of the Eiffel Tower. Next time you get a chance to visit Paris, the city of light, the city of Robespierre, and briefly, the city of Hitler, do yourself a favor and drop by.
