Painter,  Designer.  One of the most popular French artists of the 20th Century.  Dufy used sketchy lines and brilliant color to portray a sunny,  carefree world of chic promenades, yachting parties,  festivals,  and seaside resorts.  Many of his works are set in the French Riviera.  Although his light,  decorative style and subject matter suggest the art of a miniaturist,  Dufy was capable of work on an epic scale.  His masterpiece is the mural “La Fée Electricité”,  commissioned for the 1937 Paris International Exposition.  It depicts the history of electricity through portraits of over 100 scientists and philosophers,  and the positive results of their discoveries on humankind and nature.  Measuring 6,450 square feet,  it was considered the world’s largest painting at that time.  More typical are such canvases as “Bay of Anges” (1926),  “Open Window at Nice” (1927),  “Le Haras du Pin” (1932),  “Regatta at Cowes” (1934),  and “At the Races” (1935).   Dufy was born in La Havre.  He studied at the School of Fine Arts there and moved to Paris in 1900.  His earliest paintings were inspired by the Impressionists and from 1905 he exhibited with the Fauves,  with whom he is most closely associated.  By the end of World War I he had developed his own personal style.  Throughout his career Dufy was active as a commercial artist,  creating fabrics and patterns for fashion designer Paul Poiret,  silk manufacturer Bianchini-Férier,  and America’s Corning Glass Company,  and he also illustrated books by Apollinaire, Mallarmé, Colette,  and Gide.  After 1938 he was increasingly disabled by arthritis.  In 1950 Dufy traveled to the United States to become one of the first to undergo cortisone treatments;  as a result he regained the use of his hands and made a triumphant comeback at the 1952 Venice Biennale,  winning first prize.  He painted until the day he died,  never losing his taste for the good life so ebulliently evoked in his work. (bio by: Bobb Edwards)