Louise Janin began making her cosmogrammes in 1953, continuing to experiment with the form until her death more than half a century later. She worked with a wide range of paints and inks, using many different kinds of paper, including the backs of envelopes from letters she received. Invitations and private view cards, with their sturdier surfaces, lent themselves particularly well to the creation of these small, jewel-like paintings. As Janin rarely dated her cosmogrammes, these repurposed cards can provide valuable clues as to when they were made. They also reveal something of the circles in which she moved and the exhibitions she may have attended, offering glimpses into her private and professional life.

The three works included in The Winter’s Tale are of this type. One, dated 1954, is an early example, while another was painted on an invitation to an exhibition by the renowned French physicist and cosmic-ray researcher Louis Leprince-Ringuet.

Louise Janin (1893–1997) was an American-born artist who settled permanently in Paris in 1923, where she developed a distinctive practice informed by Asian spirituality, Buddhist, Hindu and Taoist mythology, and the relationship between art and music. After studying at the California School of Fine Arts, she travelled extensively in Asia before moving to New York and subsequently Europe. Introduced to František Kupka and Henry Valensi, she joined the Musicalist movement in 1932, exhibiting regularly in Paris and internationally. Following the Second World War, her work became increasingly abstract, and in the early 1950s she developed a highly original technique inspired by marbling, transforming its material processes into what she called ‘cosmogrammes’, works imbued with her ideas of the cosmos and spiritual energy. Janin exhibited widely throughout her long career, including at Galerie Bernheim-Jeune and Galerie Georges Petit in Paris, and her work has experienced renewed interest in recent years, including its inclusion in international exhibitions of spiritual, queer and modernist art.