Grande Vague Bleue

June Wayne
Tapestry
85 x 59 in (216 cm x 150 cm)
Cotton, wool, and wool with additional fibers
EA 1 (two examples extant), 1974.

NOTES
Woven by Giselle Glaudin-Brivet (born 1943) at Atelier Giselle Glaudin-Brivet, Aubusson. This tapestry revisits an image Wayne created in both painting and lithography in 1972.

SELECTED EXHIBITIONS
Fullerton Museum Center, 2024; The Armory Show, New York, 2023; MB Abram Galleries, 2017; David Richard Gallery, Santa Fe, 2013; Art Institute of Chicago, 2010.

COMMENTS

“Waves are such a great mystery, especially for an artist to draw. A wave has no edges. Whatever it does, it does far away from where you can really see it. We think the water is rushing towards us. Actually the action is quite different. Everything is rushing towards us and the water takes on the shape of that energy but actually any particular spot is mostly going up and down. It’s paradoxical—it ain’t what you see. You can’t be sure what you’re looking at. And yet it’s also a force that has no respect whatsoever for your opinion. It’s the human dilemma.”

—June Wayne in video conversation with MB Abram at Wayne’s Tamarind studio, 2009

Wayne created the image of the blue tidal wave in three media and at three very different scales: a lithograph thirty inches high, a painting seventy—two inches high, and a tapestry eighty—six inches high. She was exploring the effect of scale on the impact of an image and concluded that the extremes of small and large scale held more power than life-size images.

—Robert P. Conway, A Catalogue Raisonné 1936-2006, June Wayne - The Art of Everything, Rutgers University Press.