About this work
The title says it plainly: a downpour, caught in mid-fall. *L'Averse (Rain)* is an etching and drypoint in colors, signed by Icart in the lower right and embossed with the artist's characteristic windmill blindstamp. Typical of Icart's 1925 outdoor compositions, the work captures a woman seized by the elements — a subject he returned to repeatedly that year, most famously in the companion print *Gust of Wind*, where a young woman stands beneath a dramatic tree, her dress blowing in the wind. In *L'Averse*, the drama is vertical and aerial: rainfall dictates the composition's energy, pressing down on a figure who responds with wit rather than distress. Icart's palette here is characteristically soft — pale grays and warm flesh tones threaded through cool washes — and the drypoint's velvety burr gives the image a tactile atmosphere that a photograph simply cannot replicate.
The work was published in Paris in 1925 by Les Graveurs Modernes, 194 rue de Rivoli — the same atelier that issued Icart's most celebrated prints of the decade. The year 1925 was a defining one: the term "Art Deco" was effectively coined at the 1925 Paris Exposition des Arts Décoratifs , and Icart's prints were already fully expressive of everything that movement would come to mean. In the late 1920s, Icart was very successful both artistically and financially, and had begun chronicling the shift from the fussy fashions of the late 19th century to the more sinuous world of early 20th-century Art Deco. *L'Averse* sits at the crest of that confidence — casual in its elegance, technically assured, and entirely fluent in the language of a modern Parisian woman navigating the world on her own terms.
As wall art, *L'Averse* suits rooms that have a considered quietness to them: a reading room,
