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Lot Essay
As Alfred H. Barr, Jr. has stated regarding the present painting:
Studio in a Painted Frame, is, I believe, the finest of Picasso's series of recent [1956] paintings of the interior of his villa at Cannes. In it the artist has transformed the fantastic, through functioning, disorder of his studio into a beautifully controlled design suggesting at first glance his decorative late Cubist style. Yet once one has seen the room itself, the objects in the pictures are easily recognizable: the tall, heavily-mullioned window with the palm tree beyond, the squat brass stove from North Africa, his bronze bust of a woman with the diamond-shaped face, one canvas on the easel ready for work and others scattered about on the floor, leaning every which way.
Four colors--tan, black, brown and the unpainted white of the canvas itself--make an austere harmony, singularly Spanish. When I mentioned this to Picasso, he laughed, glanced down at the picture and said, half in self-mockery, "Velzques." In the same spirit he has painted an "old-master" frame around the margins of the canvas and put his signature below, like a museum label. (A.H. Barr, Jr., quoted in exh. cat., op. cit., New York, 1972, p. 179)
Studio in a Painted Frame, is, I believe, the finest of Picasso's series of recent [1956] paintings of the interior of his villa at Cannes. In it the artist has transformed the fantastic, through functioning, disorder of his studio into a beautifully controlled design suggesting at first glance his decorative late Cubist style. Yet once one has seen the room itself, the objects in the pictures are easily recognizable: the tall, heavily-mullioned window with the palm tree beyond, the squat brass stove from North Africa, his bronze bust of a woman with the diamond-shaped face, one canvas on the easel ready for work and others scattered about on the floor, leaning every which way.
Four colors--tan, black, brown and the unpainted white of the canvas itself--make an austere harmony, singularly Spanish. When I mentioned this to Picasso, he laughed, glanced down at the picture and said, half in self-mockery, "Velzques." In the same spirit he has painted an "old-master" frame around the margins of the canvas and put his signature below, like a museum label. (A.H. Barr, Jr., quoted in exh. cat., op. cit., New York, 1972, p. 179)