Autumn-Winter
Aubusson tapestry woven by the Pinton workshop.
With its bolduc, n°6/6.
Circa 1975.
Jean Picart le Doux was one of the leading figures in the revival of tapestry. His career began in 1943 when he created cartoons for the ocean liner "La Marseillaise." Close to Lurçat, whose theories he embraced (limited tones, numbered cartoons, etc.), he was a founding member of the APCT (Association of Tapestry Cartoon Painters) and soon after became a professor at the École Nationale Supérieure des Arts Décoratifs. The French government commissioned numerous cartoons from him, most of which were woven in Aubusson, and some at the Gobelins Manufactory: the most spectacular were for the University of Caen, the Théâtre du Mans, the ocean liner France, and the Prefecture of Creuse, among others. While Picart le Doux's designs are close to those of Lurçat, his sources of inspiration and themes are also similar, but in a more decorative than symbolic register, where celestial bodies (the sun, the moon, the stars…), elements, nature (wheat, vines, fish, birds…), man, texts,…. coexist.
The theme of the seasons is a commonplace in the history of tapestry, one that 20th-century cartoonists, Lurçat foremost among them, were keen to revive (see his Seasons tapestry commissioned by the State in 1939). For Picart le Doux, the inspiration is twofold: Nature, of course, but also Music; “Winter,” treated allegorically, one of the artist's best-known cartoons dates from 1950, but it is the “Homage to Vivaldi” of 1963, with its four seasons symbolically represented by colored suns, enameled with zodiac signs, and sources of vegetation, that our cartoon takes up, transposing the motifs horizontally.
Bibliography:
Maurice Bruzeau, Jean Picart le Doux, Murs de soleil, Editions Cercle d'art, 1972
