27 MARCH 1953, Page 16

Raoul Dufy

So Dufy, who was among the first six or eight of that great and long-lived generation of Parisians, has gone—a few short months after receiving the grand painting prize at Venice (the prize-money from which he generously gave to bursaries for younger artists). With others from Moreau's studio he helped to form the Fauvist movement ; unlike many of the others, he remained faithful to its spirit, in essentials, all his life. If elegance is the aim of civilised society, if brevity is the soul of wit, if pleasure the object of art, then Raoul Dufy was among the great. Ceramics, textiles, illustrations— he infused them all with his calligraphic gaiety. Big exhibitions of his work (there will be one in Paris this summer) look disappointingly repetitious and slight, but, for all that, Dufy distilled the froth of the twentieth-century social occasion with more grace and gusto than