Resurrected Mural

In his old age, Raoul Dufy fretted a great deal over the fate of the painting he considered a masterpiece, the gigantic mural called The Fairy Electricity. Shown at the 1937 International Exposition in Paris, it was later cut up into 250 sections and stored in a musty warehouse. Despite Dufy's best efforts, no place could be found big enough to exhibit the mural permanently.

Now, eleven years after Dufy's death, the painting has been reassembled and installed in the great semi-elliptical hall of Paris' Museum of Modern Art, where it has become the major attraction of a mediocre institution. Crowds shuffle back and forth, dazzled by the light bouncing off The Fairy Electricity's lacquered surface--for real electricity has not served to light it very well.

Tossed in amidst sprouting red volcanoes, traffic lights, an orchestra, lightning, tricolored smoke, tankers, sail boats and quiet pastoral scenes stand 110 greats of the history of science. To make things less bewildering for the literate, Dufy labeled the figures. Originally he painted all of them -- Archimedes, who once ran naked through the streets of Syracuse, Thales, Aristotle, Leonardo, Bacon, Galileo, Faraday, Pascal, Morse, Edison, Bell, Helmholtz--in the nude. Then he had extras from the Comedie Franchise model period costumes while be dressed up his pantheon.

But is it the masterpiece Dufy thought it to be? Its central focus, a dynamo rendered blueprint-style in all its 1937 grandeur, is sublimely anachronistic; its diversity makes it seem a collage of pages from a sketchbook; its pretentious setting heightens all its weaknesses. Somewhat ambiguously, the museum bills the mural as "the world's largest painting"; viewers go away feeling that they have seen the world's largest hand-painted billboard.

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