ArtistPicart le Doux, Charles

Artist Years1881-1959

Artist NationalityFrench

TitlePoppies

Year1920

MediumPainting > Oil

DimensionsCanvas: 26 X 21 inches

Accession NumberRC1643

NotesCharles Alexandre Picart Le Doux (July 12, 1881—September 11, 1959) was a French painter, engraver, book illustrator, poet and author. He was part of the artistic milieu of Montmartre in the years before World War I, and active in the circle of Jules Romains and the Abbaye de Créteil group of artists and writers. A celebration of his work, the book Picart Le Doux, was published in 1945, and in 1950 he was made a Chevalier of the Legion of Honor. He was born and died in the 14th arrondissement of Paris. His son Jean Picart Le Doux (1902-1982) also became a notable artist.

He descended from a Parisian family whose genealogy has been traced to the birth on February 29, 1744, of Louis Picart Ledoux, first commander of the firefighters of Paris. His grandfather was a glass painter, Louis Charles Auguste Picart Le Doux, who executed the south rose window of Notre-Dame de Paris. It was he who first taught young Charles to draw.

He studied at the Lycée Janson-de-Sailly before committing to an artistic career, first taking courses at the Académie Julian under Marcel Baschet, then at the Beaux-Arts de Paris in Saint-Germain-des-Prés until 1902, when he moved to Montmartre. In his memoir Monelle de Montrmatre (1953) he wrote,

Not satisfied by the teaching, practically nil, at the École des Beaux-Arts, I spent hours of pictorial incubation in the Durand-Ruel gallery. I discovered Manet, Monet, Renoir, Cézanne, Pissaro. I had the revelation that painting should be "the expression of life."

In Montmartre, Picart Le Doux frequented the Lapin Agile cabaret, where he met and became close friends with Suzanne Valadon and her son Maurice Utrillo, only two years his junior but whom Picart Le Doux recalled as "very young then, seeming to live on the margins of life."

Among his wide circle of friends and colleagues in pre-World War I Montmartre were many writers and fellow artists. In his memoir, Picart Le Doux mentions Maurice Asselin, George Bottini [fr], Charles Camoin, Ricciotto Canudo, Francis Carco, Gaston Couté, Andre Deslignières [fr], Guus van Dongen, Roland Dorgelès, Maurice-Edme Drouard, Yvonne George, Max Jacob, Pierre Mac Orlan, Albert Marquet, Henri Matisse, Alexandre Mercereau, Fernand Piet, Pablo Picasso, Ludovic-Rodo Pissarro [fr], Maurice Princet, Paul Reboux, Georges Ribemont-Dessaignes, and Félix Vallotton.

He was friends with the Olympic silver medalist in sailing, Jacques Doucet, and mourned his death after World War I. He went sailing in Le Havre with the artist and Olympic sailing competitor G. Pigeard, and at Pigeard's studio in Montmartre "made imaginary journeys in his little Chinese room, after smoking a few pipes of opium."

He also forged enduring friendships with René Arcos, Charles Vildrac, Georges Duhamel, Conrad Kickert, and Jules Romains, moving in the circle of the Abbaye de Créteil group of artists and writers.

Picart Le Doux first exhibited in Paris at the Salon des Indépendants in 1904, and later at the Salon de la Société Nationale des Beaux-Arts, the Salon des Tuileries, and the Salon d’Automne, of which he became a member. His first one-man exhibition was at the Paris gallery of Eugéne Blot, in 1910. He also exhibited at the gallery of Charles Vildrac at 11 rue de Seine.

In 1913, Picart Le Doux participated in the mock election of the fou littéraire [fr] (literary lunatic) Jean-Pierre Brisset as the "Prince of Thinkers," a hoax engineered by Jules Romains that culminated with a procession, speeches, and a banquet at the Hôtel des sociétés savantes (Paris) [fr] celebrating the eccentric Brisset, then in his seventies. Brisset died in 1919, but Romains continued to organize an annual dinner in honor of the "Prince" until 1939.

At the time World War I began, Picart Le Doux was living on Rue Gabrielle [fr], across from Max Jacob, with a view of Sacré-Cœur.

In 1921, he met the painter and sculptor Aristide Maillol, who remained a close friend until Maillol's death in 1944. Picart Le Doux recounted their friendship in an article published in 1950.

In 1937, he was awarded the Grande Médaille at the Exposition Internationale in Paris.

This new war was a bad movie I had already seen, but even more stupid, more hackneyed. It was not a war but a cascade of interlocking wars. Business war, religious war, political war, war of conquest, stupid war of people made rotten by venality, love of gold, of domination!…Survival was about narrowly avoiding being shot by costumed killers, paid killers, and volunteer killers."

Anticipating the German invasion of Poland in 1939, and seeking a safe haven, Picart Le Doux left Paris with his wife and daughter and moved to Touraine. On September 1, Jules Romains welcomed them to his home in Saint-Avertin, the Manoir de la Grand'Cour [fr], where Picart Le Doux set up an atelier in the orangery. In their memoirs, both Romains and his wife Lise reflected fondly on this period of shared refuge. Romains wrote: "Thanks to them, I have kept from that winter, still at peace but imbued with a dull anguish, a memory of friendship, fantasy, and grace that helped create an atmosphere that was still breathable."[23] In spring of 1940 Picart Le Doux and his family left Grandcour "and rented a house nearby. They spent the entire period of the Occupation in Touraine."

On July 26, 1944, the Provisional Government of the French Republic commissioned Picart Le Doux to paint an oil on canvas mounted on panel, 6 meters high and 3.4 meters wide, representing an allegory of the Loire Valley. The river, personified as a nude woman, is accompanied by a woman dressed in a traditional costume, with images of the local landscape and architecture to either side, in a composition inspired by 16th-century tapestries. The artist captioned his work with a rhyming couplet: "Loire a la chair de lys, fille noble et rebelle/ainsi le doux fardeau vint l'echoir d'etre belle." The work can still be seen in the billiard room of the Préfecture d’Indre-et-Loire in Tours.

After the war, Picart Le Doux returned to Paris to his home at the end of a courtyard at 40, rue Boissonade, described by Romains as "a small one-story house, the main room of which was a large atelier. The whole place was full of poetry."

The aftermath of the world war left him utterly dispirited.

"The modern world had become poisoned, the air unbreathable, yet this was the world I had to live in, this was the air I had to breathe! Like a beleaguered beast, the dreamer, the misfit, the one who did not want to belong to anything or anyone was pursued by a merciless social pack. I tried to slip through the cracks of that dark net, to occupy my modest parcel of a moral No Man's Land, and to suppress my resentments. With age I managed to look at life with indulgence. Men deserved pity, my duty was to give them my tenderness. Who was I to judge them?

At the same time, a high point of his career came with the publication in 1945 of the book Picart Le Doux, which presented reproductions of many of his works, and collected essays on the artist by thirteen writers published over thirty-five years, from Yvanhoé Rambosson in 1910 to Luc Durtain in 1945. The book also included a selection of aphorisms by Picart Le Doux, among them, "A revolutionary painting is not necessarily a revolting painting"; and, "The tragedy of modern life is not the harshness of the struggle, but its mediocrity."

In 1950, he was named a Chevalier of the Legion of Honor.

In the last decade of his life, Picart Le Doux became a published author. His works included an essay about his late friend Aristide Maillol (1950), a memoir, Monelle de Montmartre (1953), and two books of poetry, Discrédit (1956) and Nacres, thrènes et poèmes (1959).

Picart Le Doux died on September 11, 1959, in Paris.
(source: wikipedia.org)