Oiseau à la balustrade (Bird with balustrade)
Tapestry woven by the Braquenié workshop.
With label.
1954.
Jean Picart le Doux is one of the foremost figures in the renaissance of the art of tapestry. His earliest contributions to the field date back to 1943 when he designed cartoons for the passenger ship “la Marseillaise”. A close associate of Lurçat, whose theories he would adopt (limited palette, numbered cartoons…), he was a founding member of the A.P.C.T. (Association des Peintres-cartonniers de Tapisserie), and soon after, a teacher at the Ecole Nationale Supérieure des Arts Décoratifs. The state gave him several commissions most of them at the Aubusson workshop, and some at the Gobelins : the most spectacular of these being for the University of Caen, the Theatre in Le Mans, the passenger ship France or the Prefecture of the Creuse département … In as much as Picart le Doux’s aesthetic is close to that of Lurçat, so also is his insipiration and his subject matter, although in a register which is more decorative than symbolic, where he brings together heavenly bodies (the sun, the moon, the stars…), the elements, nature (wheat, vines, fish, birds…), man, literary quotation …
Picart le Doux, around 1954, produced a series of designs that reflect a ‘Grand Siècle’ classicism, featuring a jumble of French formal gardens (which would later become the title of a tapestry), basins, mandolins, fountains and trellises, evoking the pleasures of Versailles and Vaux-le-Vicomte, where Lully rubs shoulders with Le Nôtre; these echoes can be found in the work of other artists of the period, such as Süe and Arbus, as well as Brianchon in tapestry.
Bibliography :
Marthe Belle-Joufray, Jean Picart le Doux, Publications filmées d’art et d’histoire, 1966
Maurice Bruzeau, Jean Picart le Doux, Murs de soleil, Editions Cercle d’art, 1972, n°56
Exh. Cat. Jean Picart le Doux Tapisseries, Musée municipal d’Art et d’Histoire, Saint-Denis, 1976
Exh. Cat. Jean Picart le Doux, Musée de la Poste, 1980
