Charles 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 (1902–1982) also became a notable artist.
Family and education
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.Family archives of Ariane Bala, granddaughter of Charles Picart Le Doux.
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."Picart Le Doux (1953), p. 82.
Artistic milieu of Montmartre and early career 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."Picart Le Doux (1953), p. 83
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, , Charles Camoin, Ricciotto Canudo, Francis Carco, Gaston Couté, , Guus van Dongen, Roland Dorgelès, , Yvonne George, Max Jacob, Pierre Mac Orlan, Albert Marquet, Henri Matisse, Alexandre Mercereau, Fernand Piet, Pablo Picasso, , Maurice Princet, Paul Reboux, Georges Ribemont-Dessaignes, and Félix Vallotton.Picart Le Doux (1953), pp. 17-18, 33, 42, 80, 82-83, 90-92.
He was friends with the Olympic silver medalist in sailing, Jacques Doucet, and mourned his death after World War I.Picart Le Doux (1953), p. 42. 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."Picart Le Doux (1953), p. 89.
He also forged enduring friendships with , Charles Vildrac, Georges Duhamel, , and Jules Romains, moving in the circle of the Abbaye de Créteil group of artists and writers.Rambosson, p. 11-12.
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 , in 1910.Picart Le Doux (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 (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 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.Romains, p. 97.Decimo, Marc. Jean-Pierre Brisset, Prince des Penseurs, Poitiers: Editions Ramsay, 1986, p. 23.
At the time World War I began, Picart Le Doux was living on , across from Max Jacob, with a view of Sacré-Cœur.Picart Le Doux (1953), p. 91.
World War I The halcyon days of Montmartre came to an abrupt end with the onset of World War I. "As an unrepentant pacifist," Picart Le Doux regarded the escalating hostilities of 1914 with "disgust" and "repulsion. Collective madness had, like a cancer, invaded the most lucid minds, the best hearts."Picart Le Doux (1953), p. 30.
On August 2, the day Germany occupied Luxembourg and exchanged fire with French units, he wandered through Paris, horrified at the celebrations in the streets. EvenMontmartre, once so welcoming, had lost its raison d'être, its childish and picturesque soul. I stopped at the terrace of the Cyrano in Place Blanche. The dense crowds were exuberant with joy, all shouting: "To Berlin! To Berlin!"…Weary, I went down the Rue Pigalle. I walked into one of those shady bars reserved for inverts. These, I thought, must fear violence. This was not the case. Although most of these gentlemen were dressed in feminine garments, they too wanted to fight: "To Berlin!"Picart Le Doux (1953), p. 31-32.
Quickly drafted into the French army, he paid a last visit to his studio, "which I thought I would never see again," and slipped into his pocket his copy of Rimbaud's Les Illuminations, the book he deemed "the most apt to console me for the stupidity of men. It was to be my companion for the next four years."Picart Le Doux (1953), p. 33Chance, circumstances, a favorable destiny—how should I know?—caused me to be assigned as a medic to a divisional ambulance.…We didn't know anything about our jobs as medics when, suddenly, we saw the wounded arriving. Light injuries at first, one by one, from time to time, then the pace quickened, intensified, and a few hours later we were submerged. We didn't know what to do.Picart Le Doux (1953), pp. 37-38.
In his role as a medic, for four years Picart Le Doux daily witnessed the worst suffering and death imaginable; amid "the sickening smell of filth and bloody juice oozing from the blotter of bandages," he was often the last person to whom a dying man spoke. "After the last shot of morphine, the remnant of what had been a man…begged me to write to his wife, to his children. It was necessary to reassure them…I promised everything…then I hid to cry."Picart Le Doux (1953), p. 40-41.
The experience was shattering. "Men failed to take my life, but they killed my soul and bruised my heart forever."
After World War I 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.Picart Le Doux (1950).
In 1937, he was awarded the Grande Médaille at the Exposition Internationale in Paris.Bénézit.
Picart Le Doux saw the approach of World War II with dread.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."Picart Le Doux (1953), p 73.
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 , 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."Romains, p. 95. 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."Jules-Romains, pp. 251-252.
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.Marron-Wojewódzki, Maud. "12. Photographies extraites du dossier de commande à Charles Alexandre Picart Le Doux de la peinture La Touraine, pour la préfecture d’Indre-et-Loire, 1945", Un Art d’État? Commandes publiques aux artistes plasticiens 1945-1965, livret de visite for the exposition March 31 to July 13, 2017 at the Archives Nationales, 59 rue Guynemer, 93383 Pierrefitte-sur-Seine, p. 14.Guiochon, Xavier-Philippe and Bettinelli, Philippe. "La politique de l’État en matière de décor de bâtiments administratifs: un art national?", In Situ: Revue des patrimoines, number 34, 2018. 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.Guide de la Visite des Salons de la Préfecture
After the war, Picart Le Doux returned to Paris to his home at the end of a courtyard at 40, , 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?Picart Le Doux (1953), p. 44.
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."Rambosson, p. 64: "Une peinture révolutionnaire n'est pas nécessairement une peinture révoltante"; "Le tragique de la vie moderne, ce n'est pas la dureté de la lutte, mais sa médiocrité."
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).Opposite the title page of Monelle de Montmartre, two works were listed as forthcoming, titled Le Sarcloir Indolent, Poèmes and L'Épiderme de Marsias; these appear not to have published, or may have been retitled or incorporated into Discrédit and Nacres, thrènes et poèmes.
Picart Le Doux died on September 11, 1959, in Paris.
Works Picart Le Doux painted self-portraits, portraits of family and notable friends, still lifes, impressionistic landscapes, and murals. He was also, for more than four decades, a prolific illustrator of books.