56. Paul Colin, Man in Overcoat, with Added Study of His Head

Artist	Paul Colin, French, Nancy 1892–Nogent-sur-Marne 1985
Title, Date	Man in Overcoat, with Added Study of His Head (Homme en pardessus et reprise de la tête), 1913
Medium	Watercolor on beige paper
Dimensions	23 × 15 1/16 in. (58.5 × 38.3 cm)
Inscriptions + Marks	Lower left: Paul Colin 13
Provenance	[Christine Bethenod, Paris, until 2011; to Weisberg]; Yvonne and Gabriel Weisberg, Minneapolis
Exhibition History	"Reflections on Reality: Drawings and Paintings from the Weisberg Collection," Mia, 2022–23
Credit Line	Promised gift of Gabriel P. and Yvonne M.L. Weisberg, Minneapolis

Paul Colin created hundreds and hundreds of posters from the 1920s to the 1940s. These reflected the spirit of Art Deco and the Jazz Age, touting everything from cars to cigarettes to ocean liners (fig. 1). Among his most memorable posters were those celebrating performer Josephine Baker (fig. 2), with whom he became romantically involved. Offensive as some of those posters are now,¹ they helped launch the American-born Baker to stardom.

Colin’s career began far from the footlights of the Paris revues. He grew up in pre–World War I Nancy, an artistically vibrant city in northeastern France. His early development was rooted in the strong tradition and methodical training of the city’s École des Beaux-Arts (School of Fine Arts). Little seems to have survived from Colin’s formative years, which makes this 1913 drawing especially important. It reveals the artist’s early efforts to portray the dispossessed. The auxiliary study at the upper right shows him rethinking his presentation of the man’s head, changing his gaze from outward to downward, thus increasing the viewer’s emotional connection to the figure’s interior world. In his choice of subject, Colin was continuing the naturalist tradition that focused on wanderers, street performers, and beggars.

GPW