CHARLES PICART LE DOUX

Biography

Charles Alexandre Picart Le Doux was born on July 12, 1881 in Paris. Student at the Académie Julian then at the Beaux-Arts in Paris until 1902, he first lived in Montmartre and frequented Le Lapin Agile where he met Suzanne Valadon and her son Maurice Utrillo (two years old younger) and creates unshakeable friendships with René Arcos, Charles Vildrac, Georges Duhamel, Jules Romains with the group of the Abbaye in Créteil.

From 1904, he exhibited at the Salon d'Automne in which he became a member, then at the Salon des Indépendants. He exhibited at the Charles Vildrac gallery and participated with Jules Romains and their friends in the election of the "prince of thinkers", namely Jean-Pierre Brisset, whose portrait he will execute.

In 1910, the Biot gallery devoted his first major solo exhibition to him. That same year, he was received at the National Society of Fine Arts.

The First World War plunges him, as a nurse, closer to the horror. He will come out broken and definitively won over to theses and pacifist movements to which he will always have his support. After the armistice and a period of depression, he threw himself deeply into the work trying to "forget the technique" for the benefit of the model.

In 1921, he met Aristide Maillol with whom he found a faithful friendship of which the painter still testifies some time before his death.

From 1923, he exhibited at the Salon des Tuileries then at the Charpentier and Drouant-David galleries in Paris as well as in San Francisco, New York, Rio de Janeiro, London (Ohana gallery), Berlin and Munich.

In 1934-1935 he left Montmartre to occupy a studio 40, rue Boissonade in Montparnasse. The artist creates a decorative set for the Normandy liner. The national museums show many paintings his. A great gold medal at the 1937 World Fair, Charles Picart Le Doux was in charge of decorating the Lycée Hélène-Boucher in Paris.

In 1940, installed in Touraine, first at Jules Romains in Saint Avertin, then in Tours, the painter decorates the prefecture and produces many paintings on the theme of Touraine de Balzac (castle of Saché). During this period he produced a hundred portraits.

Returning to Paris in 1945, he again became a professor at the Académie Colarossi and at that of the Grande Chaumière, where he had taught since 1927. Charles Picart Le Doux carried out a decoration for the town hall of the 14th arrondissement of Paris.

Numerous exhibitions are dedicated to the painter in Amiens, Angers, Caen, Moulins, Rouen, Saint-Nazaire, the museums of Metz and Nancy, San Francisco, Oslo ... The Mariac gallery organized his last exhibition in 1959.

Manly painter, powerful in his landscapes but also sensual in his nudes and deep in his portraits, Charles Picart Le Doux was, as Jules Romains wrote, the last true impressionist, comparable to Renoir in research, until the end of his life from the perfection of his art. The artist was never part of the Impressionist movement, which ended at birth.

He is the father of the painter Yves Picart Le Doux, of the cardboard painter Jean Picart Le Doux and of Jacqueline Picart Le Doux. He had a studio 13, rue Paul-Féval in Paris.