Slick Chic

Raoul Dufy is the 71-year-old granddaddy of modem chic. His personal blend of bright, carelessly smeared colors with shorthand draftsmanship is imitated in chichi perfume ads and fashion magazines month after month. Last week gallery-goers in Paris and Manhattan could see the real thing: paintings from Dufy's palsied but still brilliant hand and (in Paris) tapestries woven from his designs. The tapestries, reported Paris' Combat, were "a triumphal success . . . pure art."

So were the paintings--almost too successful. Dufy never lets nature trouble him; he uses it, like a seasoned chef making a salad. The fresh green of a hillside, the blue of the Mediterranean, the delicate lilt of a racing horse, the crisp lines of the Eiffel Tower, the smoke of a train or the plump pinkness of a nude are all equally his dish. Crippled with arthritis, he sometimes has to strap his brush to his hand but (like Renoir, who was also arthritic) he permits only pleasure and good taste to appear in his work.

One of nine children, Dufy had to pinch centimes in his student days. "I concentrated on drawing," he remembers, "because paints were too expensive." That concentration made him a superb draftsman, with a quick, nervous but perfectly assured style reminiscent of Japan's 19th Century master, Hokusai. But Dufy did not begin to paint like Dufy until he was in his 403. He lived on the top of Montmartre, got along by designing wallpaper (see below), tapestries, upholstery and dresses.

As soon as he found his own painting style, he found a market and critical acclaim, for Dufy's art is nothing if not charming. Today he lives in a comfortably bourgeois house surrounded by maple trees in Perpignan. "Every night," he told a recent visitor, "I go to bed tired but contented. I do as much as my strength permits; I think I'm entitled to sleep in peace."

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