Shop art print and framed art The Spark of Life (detail) by Raoul Dufy

La Fée Électricité (The Electricity Fairy) was painted by Raoul Dufy for the 1937 Universal Exhibition in Paris. "To highlight the role of electricity in national life, and in particular the key social role played by electric light" was the aim of the commission given to Dufy by the Compagnie parisienne de distribution d'électricité to be shown in the Electricity Pavilion at the 1937 Universal Exhibition. With the help of his brother and two other assistants, Raoul Dufy created a painting of monumental dimensions in a hangar made available to him at the Saint-Ouen power station, begun in April 1936 and completed a year later. It was commissioned by the Paris City Hall (electricity company) as part of the International Exhibition of Arts and Techniques in Modern Life, held in Paris from 25 May to 25 November 1937. The painting is made up of 250 panels of non-deformable plywood, parqueted on wood and curved (to match the curvature of the metal framework of Robert Mallet-Stevens's Palais de la Lumière), each measuring 2 m high by 1.20 m wide. He used a very light oil paint, designed by the chemist Jacques Maroger, which gave the illusion of gouache and dried very quickly. The figures were drawn in Indian ink, then the colours were applied on top. At 600 m2, this painting was long considered to be the largest in the world, but it was far surpassed by Werner Tübke's Bauernkriegspanorama, painted between 1976 and 1987 and totalling 1,722 m2 on a single canvas. Two-thirds of the [...]

 

This artwork is a painting from the modern period. It belongs to the fauvism style.

 

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