The presence of the man of letters and scholar Goethe among Dufy’s scholars may surprise. He is represented at the end of the frieze of scholars, next to Stevenson and above Ampère. 

Visuel de la fresque (détail)

He is contemplating the Arrighi power plant in Vitry and the beauty of the turbines, and holds in his hand an unrolled scroll inscribed with a quatrain from a poem: 

 “I turned to craftsmen…

I studied mechanics and chemistry…

The time for beauty has passed; now squalor 

And implacable necessity command our time.”

This text is adapted from Goethe’s diary at the time of his travels in Italy, and in particular after his visit to the arsenal in Venice in 1786. Dufy invokes Goethe in a plea for progress to eradicate “squalor and implacable necessity” – in a justification of the Spirit of Electricity, a hymn to progress through electricity.

Goethe is also famous for his Theory of Colours, which Dufy probably did not know about, while nonetheless sharing some of its insights.

Original watercolour by Goethe (1809), Goethe Museum, Frankfurt 

The Neo-Impressionists, and later to some extent the Fauves and Orphic Cubists, followed The Laws of Contrast of Colour by the chemist Michel Eugène Chevreul, who was partly inspired by the theories of Goethe as early as 1839 and was also director of the Gobelins textile factory. It should not be forgotten that Dufy worked for 18 years as a textile designer and benefited from the advice of the chemist Zifferlin. Being interested in the perception of colour rather than its physical explanation, Goethe contrasted light and shade, light and dark, yellow “very close to light” and blue “very close to shade”, For him, saturation of yellow gives red, just as saturation of blue gives red. Green is born from the mixture of blue and yellow, just as violet is born from the mixture of blue and red, orange from yellow and red, and so on. Goethe painted a colour circle where on the right, the positive (pure) side is formed by the colours yellow and red. On the left, the negative (dark) side is formed by blues and purples. 

Looking at the flat colours of the Spirit, we can see that Dufy has clearly taken up the colour circle of Goethe’s theory: yellow, red and green as complementary colours for the right-hand side and blue and purple for the left-hand side. The yellow-white beam of light captured by the Spirit somehow chases away the blue. The rainbow can also be seen here, with Dufy using the different colours for his flat tints. 

Visuel de la fresque (panorama général)