Fashioning the Woodcut: Raoul Dufy and the Avant-Garde

Abstract

Raoul Dufy created woodcut illustrations for a book of poetry by Guillaume Apollinaire entitled, Le Bestiaire, au, Le Cortege d'Orphee, in 1910. Shortly thereafter, radical haute couture leader, Paul Poiret, commissioned Dufy to carve woodcuts to be printed onto fabric and used in Poiret's fashion designs. The goal of this thesis is twofold; to show how the nineteenth-century woodcut revival provided Dufy with a medium that simultaneously suggests popular French tradition and contemporary avant-garde culture and to reveal how Dufy's early employment of the woodcut led to a lifetime involvement with the decorative arts that both contributed to his success and style as a painter. These involvements mark a highpoint in the way the woodcut, which had fallen into artistic disfavor during most of the nineteenth-century, was returned by Dufy to the center of avant-garde culture and fashion.