About the document

Unique document dedicated by Raoul Dufy to his friends the Poirets (provenance guaranteeing authenticity).

[...] While the Gobelins tapestry manufacture was renewing itself, the Beauvais Manufacture, which had become stagnant, kept working endlessly on the exact same designs. Everything changed with the appointment of Jean Ajalbert—a lawyer, writer, and art critic—in 1917 at the head of the aforementioned Manufacture.
"One who longs for the past?", he used to say, "No. To everything known, I prefer the new."
He approached the painter Raoul Dufy in the 1920s to work in Beauvais. The painter had been interested in textile art since 1911, creating his first printed fabrics for the fashion designer Paul Poiret.
It was with this collection that the painter approached the technique of Tapestry in 1924. [...]

[...] The four-leaf folding screen, a panorama of the capital ("Panorama de Paris", 1924-1933) or a map as a wonder-struck child might have imagined it, pays a strong tribute to the Eiffel Tower, treated here as a "souvenir object", a favorite theme among Roaring Twenties artists whom it continued to enchant. One can think, among others and after Apollinaire, of Delaunay, Chagall, or Cocteau.
Malraux's creative originality at La Lanterne was the layout of an unprecedented Music Room, entirely foreign to the "spirit of the place". For him, creation had always rhymed with rebellion. Indeed, from mid-September 1962, the Mobilier National delivered, at his request, the "Paris furniture set" by Raoul Dufy to the Pavilion of La Lanterne: a folding screen, a sofa, two large armchairs, four small armchairs, and four chairs that had been stagnating in storage since 1933.
Malraux left La Lanterne in the autumn of 1967 to join Louise de Vilmorin in Verrières-le-Buisson once the Antimemoirs were finished. The "Paris" set would be returned to the Mobilier National on April 2, 1969, as shown by a receipt in the archives. [...]
Françoise Theillou: "Malraux decorator: a Music Room for La Lanterne". (© Présence d'André Malraux sur la Toile / www.malraux.org)


[...] Poiret met DUFY in 1910 while the latter was working on woodcuts intended to illustrate Guillaume Apollinaire's "Le bestiaire ou cortège d'Orphée". It was the painter's first work of this kind. For a first attempt, it was a masterstroke that left Poiret filled with admiration. The idea of a collaboration with the painter naturally blossomed in the designer's mind. No sooner thought than done, this collaboration was sealed! At the end of spring 1911, the two men opened a small textile printing workshop. [...]
In 1925, Dufy executed 14 wall hangings for Paul Poiret, who decorated his three barges with them for the International Exhibition of Modern Decorative and Industrial Arts. [...]
These are today scattered across the world. Some have never reappeared since the exhibition. We can only admire them on old black and white photographs. The others are rarely displayed. The 1925 exhibition was a failure for Poiret. A failure from which the designer would never truly recover. [...].
David Guillon. Excerpts from the dufy-poiret catalogue of the Galerie Guillon-Laffaille from 1998 (attached to the photomontage).

Our document was made available to the Musée de Montmartre Jardins Renoir and presented as part of the exhibition "Le Paris de Dufy" (May 19, 2021 - January 2, 2022).