Georges Valmier was from the start an enthusiastic draughtsman. In 1905 he enrolled at the Académie Humbert. Two years later he passed the entrance examination for the École des Beaux-Arts de Paris, where he studied painting in Luc-Olivier Merson’s master class until 1909. Valmier’s early Cubist-inspired work shows the influence of both Georges Braque and Paul Cézanne, whose work he had become familiar with in 1907 at the ‘Salon d’Automne’. During the years that followed Valmier executed mostly portraits. He articulated the motifs of his still lifes and landscapes like prisms while increasingly enhancing volume.

In 1913 the artist had his first opportunity to display his work at the ‘Salon des Indépendants’, regularly taking part in these exhibitions until the outbreak of the First World War. Conscripted at once, Valmier sketched his impressions of the war in ‘Carnets de guerre’. The small, delicate collages which garnered him attention in 1916 were markedly different from the works of older Cubists like Picasso, Braque and Gris, their distinction perhaps most clearly demonstrated through Valmier's ebullient use of color. Rather than using the muted, neutral palette favored by the pre-war Cubists, Valmier embraced bold, vibrant hues in his paintings as a means of expression. "With the current plastic expressions," Valmier wrote, "color takes on its true meaning, its own life. Color is the substance which is destined to express the intellect"(quoted in Denise Bazetoux, Georges Valmier, Catalogue raisonné, Paris, 1993, p. 20).

On his return to Paris in 1918, Valmier met the collector and art dealer, Léonce Rosenberg, who was so enthusiastic about his work that he gave him a contract. The artist now began to make preliminary studies for his paintings in the form of gouaches and collages. He approached his final motif via numerous composition studies, some of them only slight variations in colour or shade. His geometric phase culminated in a period of work that was almost abstract. At the same time Valmier was seeking new materials, experimenting with egg tempera and casein colour.

By 1922, however, he was back to Cubism, producing sophisticated, balanced compositions in vibrant colours. From then on the artist participated in a great many international exhibitions. From 1928 his work again underwent a considerable change in character. Curved forms now replaced straight lines in his compositions, lending them an almost vegetal quality. The early 1930s saw Valmier again turn to abstraction. He joined ‘Abstraction-Création’, whose founding members included Auguste Herbin, Georges Vantongerloo, Hans Arp, Albert Gleizes, Jean Hélion and Frantisek Kupka. At this time Valmier was also designing stage sets and costumes for plays by Paul Claudel, Georges Pillement and Max Jacob. In 1932 he showed work at the group retrospect ‘Vingt-cinq ans de peinture abstraite’ mounted by Galérie Braun. The Galérie des Beaux-Arts in Paris showed work by Valmier in 1935 at their large-scale exhibition devoted to ‘Les créateurs du cubisme’. Two years later the artist completed his last important commission: for the French national railways pavilion at the 1937 Paris Exhibition. Having suffered from ill-health since 1932, he died in March 1937 in Montmartre.

Through his work, Georges Valmier broke with the Cubism, both synthetic and analytical, of his contemporaries Picasso, Braque and Gris. This divergence sprang from Valmier's very idea of Cubism, which was tinged with a form of spirituality, since Cubism was for him a new kind of art that transcends the subject's superficial aspects and, by its abstract nature, becomes universal. His figurative works, of which this oil is an example, are thus imbued with this abstract quality. Here, the artist is seeking less to represent this young girl than the overall idea of a young girl, as evidenced by his use of soft pastel shades of pink, blue and green; the gentle curves breaking up the straight lines; and the sketchy eyes and mouth. All these elements seem, moreover, to place the subject at the end of childhood, in a period of suspended time before she comes of age, which she is whiling away by reading.