In the broad galaxy of modern French artists, we can easily spot Raoul Dufy's lightly glittering star. He was renowned as a painter of colorful scenes at St. Tropez on the Riviera. The one who designed fashion fabrics. The one who popularized modern art with glamorous subjects and a carefree brush.

Raoul Dufy's "Autoportrait au chapeau mou," oil on canvas, 1898"Le violon rouge," oil on canvas, 1941"La dame en rose," oil on canvas, 1908"Pecheur au filet," oil on canvas, 1914"Moisson du champ d'avoine," oil on canvas, 1938
Photos (C) ADAGP, PARIS, JVACS, TOKYO, 2001

But is that all? Not according to Didier Schulmann, chief curator of the collection department at the National Museum of Modern Art in Paris' Pompidou Center. "I used to have the usual superficial view of Dufy," he said while in Tokyo recently, "but now, my opinion has completely changed."

Schulmann has spent several years researching Dufy's work for this major retrospective exhibition, specifically for Japan. Now, he believes that although Dufy "needed to live by doing glamorous paintings, they were not so important to him, because he was a painter of the interior mind."

This startling reappraisal follows the recent discovery of unexpected Dufy riches in France's national archives. In 1963, the National Museum of Modern Art acquired a significant number of Dufy's works when his widow left a legacy to the nation. This collection, augmented by subsequent gifts, spans his entire career and includes a vast number of sketches and studies as well as numerous finished paintings he chose not to sell to collectors. And here, instead of the usual picture-postcard views, are intriguing images. Figures floating in dark mysterious seas. Studio interiors, opening door upon door like some retreat from the world. And a vision of Paris, slumbering under the cosmos, as moving as Vincent van Gogh's "A Starry Night."

As the collection was dispersed through nearly 40 museums in France, connections, themes and surprising developments have been overlooked. Only now, with this rediscovery of "a virtual Dufy museum," does it become possible to take a long view of Dufy's oeuvre.

But this is a rare chance. After its tour of Japan, the collection will once more be dispersed and may not be reassembled again for years. Comprising more than 130 items, the exhibition (now at the Yasuda Kasai Museum of Art in Shinjuku) reveals an artistic journey that spanned the most exciting and important years of modern art.

Dufy was born in 1877 in Le Havre, the busy port in northern France where Eugene Boudin (1824-98), one of the fathers of Impressionism, was painting his wonderful seascapes. Dufy won a scholarship to the Ecole Nationale des Beaux-Arts in Paris. There he made friends with Georges Braque and other young rebels searching for fresh methods and meaning at the start of a new century. In the first gallery at the exhibition, revealing the influence of Impressionism and Fauvism, are early self-portraits in which Dufy returns our gaze with shy hauteur. In the early 1900s, Dufy lived in the (then) poor Parisian quarter of Montmartre, and in summer visited the familiar, luminous skies of Normandy to paint in the Impressionists' heartland. Two paintings in the first gallery express the aspirations and uncertainty of youth: Both are beach scenes at the resort of St. Adresse that immediately recall the work of Boudin. Whereas the latter's style is all softness and harmony, however, Dufy's impatient swirl of sand and tents caught in a breeze shows his growing frustration with his Impressionist heroes, who had encouraged him to believe "that using Nature as my model . . . would lead me to infinity." These canvases reveal his yearning for greater expression, and chart the beginning of a lifelong fascination with movement.

It was around 1906, during these struggles on the sand, that Dufy broke with Impressionism, deciding "to render not what I saw, but what is, what exists for me."

He was also spurred by events in Paris.

In 1905, a sensation was caused by the display of Henri Matisse's "Luxe, calme et volupte," a landscape with nude bathers painted according to the strict neo-Impressionist theories of Georges Seurat (1859-91). Here, tone was abolished; composition, heightened by flat dabs of complementary colors, was the key. A stunned Dufy called it "a miracle of the imagination."

The fruit of his subsequent break with reality is clear to see in "La rue pavoise (The Flag-decked Street)" of 1906. It is an extraordinary composition of huge flags and narrow streets, pulled together with bright colors and confident black highlights.

Paris was brimming with intoxicating new ideas, and Dufy sipped them all. In the second gallery, for example, the brush strokes of van Gogh (1853-90) are evident in "La dame en rose (The Woman in Pink"). Next, there is a Cubist version of Marseille harbor. Then, in the somber rhythms of a group of trees, breathes the spirit of Paul Cezanne (1839-1906).

By 1912, however, Dufy's discovery of design (highlighted in gallery two) and love of arabesques, patterns and calligraphic lines comes to the fore. "After World War I," said Schulmann, "Dufy found his way, inventing a relationship between lines and color to give the impression of movement." Numerous ravishing studies point to the preparation that lay behind the seemingly spontaneous brushwork in his finished works.

Favorite themes emerge in the galleries that follow: the seaside and horse races, figures, portraits, studio scenes and some lively landscapes. I particularly liked the clear colors and rapid brushwork of "Moisson du champ d'avoine (Harvesting an Oat Field)" from 1938.

A great darkness was about to fall. During World War II, Dufy literally closed the windows of his atelier and revisited such classical themes as the nude, and also produced the anguished scribbles of "Jardin abandonne (The Abandoned Garden)."

By 1948, however, we see a master once again in control. "Le violon rouge (The Red Violin)" brims with confidence and warmth. Perhaps he was remembering the musical family into which he was born more than 70 years before.

Dufy painted right to the end, experimenting with black as the color of light. There is a strange, almost ominous series of a black cargo ship, hinting at a further stage in his artistic voyage. However, the man Schulmann describes as "one of the most prolific artist of the 20th century," finally laid down his brush in 1953. But the enigma of this "quiet and dark man" remains.