Girard, Andre (France, 1901-1968) Oil Painting. “Girl in Interior.” Oil on canvas. Signed upper right An. Girard. In good condition. Measures 10 ” x 16”. Frame measures 15 ” x 21”. From the Sag Harbor, NY estate of New York author Barbara Wersba.

Andre Girard was a French painter, poster-maker and Resistance worker. During the Second World War he founded and headed the CARTE network, also taking "Carte" as his personal codename. He was the eldest child born to a pair of brewers and attended the cole des Beaux-Arts before doing military service at Saint-Cyr. He became a painter, studying with Roualt and Bonnard, as well as a caricaturist and theatre set designer.He was known as one of the best publicity poster designers in Paris during the 1930s. He set himself up in Venice in 1936–37 and in Manhattan in 1938. In New York, he produced several religious paintings (Stations of the Cross, Apocalypse, etc.) and in 1952 he decorated several churches in New York, Vermont, and California. In 1947 he published Peut-on dire la vrit sur la Rsistance, in which he presented several important corrections to Bnouville's book Le Sacrifice du matin. He died and was buried in America in 1968.

From Artistinwar: In 1941, Girard’s attention also turned to depictions of Christ, when he showed his small scaled paintings of the Way of the Cross in Cannes. His solo show in November-December 1944 at New York’s Bignou Gallery featured two rooms. In one was his series of small paintings on The Fourteen Stations of the Cross and, in another room, flowers and landscapes of France. Praised for his use of color and light, Girard’s compositions contained strong graphic elements, high contrasts and a rich use of pigment. According to the catalogue, “his work became more solemn and more moving that ever before. It is a fact that the paintings produced during the years of German oppression bear not only the marks of revolt, but even more, those of prayer.” Twelve years later, he recalled that when he arrived in New York from England in 1944: “ I used to have in my pockets notebooks full of versions of the Stations of the Cross—so much so that when I was sent to America in 1944, I had only with me these pictures. When my art dealer proposed to exhibit them, I was astonished. Such a distressing subject, such a limited number of pictures!” His wartime experience found expression through sacred art, and became a new point of departure for his images.After the war, Girard never returned to drawing political caricatures for the press; instead he opted to make sacred and secular art. He worked in an impressionist style akin to Pierre Bonnard, one of his two teachers whose shattering of light into gemlike points Girard learned to employ. The other was Georges Rouault. Girard shared Rouault’s use of heavily outlined bodies, but differed by rendering them as angular and bony forms. Ultimately, Girard’s Jesus is born of crisis, a figure that has seen the limits of human fallibility. He is marked by the austerity of war, yet radiates light. St Ann Chapel’s architect Vincent Raney designed a modern church, which features a series of angled panels that line one side, allowing light to penetrate the space indirectly. Girard drew his sketches for the Stations of the Cross on the plaster surface of the panels. Next, the final images were painted on canvas and mounted on the fourteen panels. He donated a series of 14 ink sketches to Stanford University. The Fourteen Stations of the Cross has its complement in the four stained glass windows at St. Ann Chapel, which are dedicated to the teachings and story of Jesus. Rather than go with traditional methods of stained glass panels, he instead painted directly on the glass. In his correspondence with his patron, Clare Boothe Luce, Girard outlines his reasoning for choosing these methods. Luce financed the chapel’s building as a memorial to her daughter. For her, this project intended to signal that even in the US, there were spaces that proved modernism was compatible with sacred art. Girard thought of the windows as four sections of a single, enormous work that moved through primary and secondary colors: Yellow, Green, Violet and Red. He chose the colors based on one of the earliest color canons developed by Pope Innocent III in the twelfth century, and by the sixteenth century, the rules were fixed.

Barbara Wersba, born in 1932, lived in California until age 12 when she moved to New York with her mother when her parents got divorced. Barbara Wersba is the only child of a Russian-Jewish father and a Kentucky Baptist mother. Growing up, she wanted to be a musician, or a dancer, or a poet, thinking that becoming any of these would take her out of what she believed to be a sad life. "I grew up in almost total solitude," she once said. "I thought I was lonely when I was simply a loner--and spent much of my childhood daydreaming, writing poems, and creating dramas for my dolls." When she was 11 years old, in answer to a family friend's inquiry, she impulsively declared her intent to be an actress one day. Soon after, Ms Wersba landed a part in a local play. Though she came to decide she didn't actually like acting, she stuck with it because it gave her purpose, and helped her not to feel alone. She continued as an actress through college and then professionally, until she fell ill in 1960 and was forced into a lengthy recovery. On the advice of a friend, she turned to writing to pass the time. The result was her first book for children, The Boy Who Loved the Sea, which was published in 1961. From then on, she continued as a writer. Her breakthrough novel came in 1968, with the publication of Walter, The Story of a Rat. She went on to adapt this novel into a script when her childhood acting idol, Eva Le Gallienne, had read Ms Wersba's book and wished to play the role of the elderly woman from the story. The play opened at the White Barn Theatre in Connecticut in 1975. Two of her most popular novels are Tunes for a Small Harmonica: A Novel (1976), which was a National Book Award nominee, and The Carnival of My Mind (1982). Wersba has written more than two dozen novels for both children and teens/young adults. She has also reviewed children's literature for the New York Times, written play and television scripts, and taught writing. In 1994, she founded her own small publishing company, The Bookman Press. Born in Chicago on August 19, 1932, Barbara Wersba later moved with her family to California. After her parents' divorce, she moved with her mother to New York City. She now lives in Sag Harbor, New York.