Le Déjeuner sur l'Herbe

I wanted to present here, per a specific request, a kind of genealogy of an image. Some seven years ago I started working on a very ambitious series of paintings (as well as photographs and drawings) which, of course, I never completed. Here is a short selection of drawings from the beginnings of the process. They show something of the history of the controlling image from Raimondi and Giorgione to Manet, Cezanne, Von Gloeden and Picasso, all filtered through my own views and interpretations.