Georges Picard, Head Of A Woman (1920)

GEORGES PICARD (Remiremont 1857 - Yzeures-sur-Creuse 1943)
Head of a woman
1920
Black chalk  on tracing paper
80 × 100 cm
Related work: the fresco of the half-dome, South Pavilion of the Petit Palais

This large drawing on tracing paper representing the head, shoulder and armpit of a woman, must have been used by Georges Picard for the head of the woman lying on her back in his large fresco in the half-dome of the South Pavilion of the Petit Palais. At the corners there are many holes made by pins and due to its large size, it has been folded into four. Strong contours and blurred facial features are typical of the artist.

Picard’s fresco at the Petit Palais, which tens of thousands of visitors pass by every year, is an enigma. Lying on a precipice in front of a ravine and the angular peaks of a mountain range (the Alps, perhaps?), a woman, head upwards, eyes closed, rests in an apparently uncomfortable posture. Above the sky, another naked, winged woman, probably Aurora, goddess of dawn, points to a bright star - the morning star, the planet Venus. The composition is therefore probably an allegory of the morning, but one feels that something else is going on as well.

Picard, from Vosges from a Jewish family, was one of the finest large scale decorative painters of end of the 19th and beginning of the 20th centuries, although he is sadly rather underestimated today. It is instructive to have a work-in-progress drawing such as this to show us how he achieved his fresco paintings.