Appointment of the birds
Aubusson tapestry woven by the Berthaut workshop.
With its bolduc.
1951.
Jean Picart le Doux was one of the great driving forces behind the revival of tapestry. His beginnings in the field date back to 1943: he then made cartoons for the ocean liner “la Marseillaise”. Close to Lurçat, whose theories he adopted (limited tones, Numbered cartoons,…), he was a founding member of the A.P.C.T (Association of Painter-cartoonists of Tapestry), and soon became a teacher at the Ecole Nationale Supérieure des Arts décoratifs. The State commissioned many woven cartoons from him, mostly in Aubusson, and in some cases at the Gobelins: the most spectacular would be those for the University of Caen, the Théâtre du Mans, the ocean liner France, or the Prefecture of the Creuse,…. If the designs by Picart le Doux were close to those of Lurçat, his sources of inspiration and his themes were too, but in a more decorative than symbolic register, where the celestial bodies (the sun, the moon, the stars…), the elements, nature (wheat, vines, fish, birds…), humankind, texts,… stood side by side.
The birds were a recurring motif in the artist’s output in the first half of the 1950s, as were the flecks punctuated by dots around the perimeter, a signature of Picart le Doux. Moreover, the limited chromatic palette is reminiscent of traditional greens. This tapestry was reproduced in Bruzeau’s book under No. 30.
Bibliography :
Maurice Bruzeau, Jean Picart le Doux, Murs de soleil, Editions Cercle d’art, 1972
