Lot Essay
It can be said that owls and doves were two of Picasso's life-long companions. Both of very different temperaments, the owl first appears in Picasso's oeuvre in his first etching, El Zurdo (Le gaucher), 1899, at the feet of the picador (Geiser, pl. 1). Absent from his work for nearly fifty years, the owl again makes an appearance in his work in 1947, when during his stay in Antibes an injured owl had been brought to his attention.
While Pablo was still working at the Muse d'Antibes, Sima had come to us one day with a little owl he had found in a corner of the museum. One of claws had been injured. We bandaged it and gradually it healed. We bought a cage for him and when we returned to Paris we brought him back with us and put him in the kitchen with the canaries, the pigeons, and the turtledoves. We were very nice to him but he only glared at us. Any time we went into the kitchen, the canaries chirped, the pigeons cooed and the turtledoves laughed but the owl remained stolidly silent or, at best, snorted... Every time the owl snorted at Pablo he would shout, 'Cohon, Merde,' and a few other obcenities, just to show the owl that he was even worse mannered than he was (F. Gilot and C. Lake, Life with Picasso, New York, 1964, pp. 144-145).
Picasso's fascination with birds of all types bordered on superstition, and the owl especially with its strange and aloof behaviour. Picasso again introduced this subject into his lithographs, and even later into his ceramic works while in Vallauris. As Roland Penrose has noted, "The owl with its rounded head and piercing stare seems to resemble Picasso himself. As a joke once he took an enlargement of a photo of his eyes and placed over it a white sheet of paper on which he drew the face of an owl, cutting out holes to fit his eyes like a mask. Nothing unnatural seemed to have taken place except that the bird now possessed the vision of a man whose eyes could not only see but also understand (R. Penrose, Picasso, His Life and Work, Berkeley, 1981, p. 361).
While Pablo was still working at the Muse d'Antibes, Sima had come to us one day with a little owl he had found in a corner of the museum. One of claws had been injured. We bandaged it and gradually it healed. We bought a cage for him and when we returned to Paris we brought him back with us and put him in the kitchen with the canaries, the pigeons, and the turtledoves. We were very nice to him but he only glared at us. Any time we went into the kitchen, the canaries chirped, the pigeons cooed and the turtledoves laughed but the owl remained stolidly silent or, at best, snorted... Every time the owl snorted at Pablo he would shout, 'Cohon, Merde,' and a few other obcenities, just to show the owl that he was even worse mannered than he was (F. Gilot and C. Lake, Life with Picasso, New York, 1964, pp. 144-145).
Picasso's fascination with birds of all types bordered on superstition, and the owl especially with its strange and aloof behaviour. Picasso again introduced this subject into his lithographs, and even later into his ceramic works while in Vallauris. As Roland Penrose has noted, "The owl with its rounded head and piercing stare seems to resemble Picasso himself. As a joke once he took an enlargement of a photo of his eyes and placed over it a white sheet of paper on which he drew the face of an owl, cutting out holes to fit his eyes like a mask. Nothing unnatural seemed to have taken place except that the bird now possessed the vision of a man whose eyes could not only see but also understand (R. Penrose, Picasso, His Life and Work, Berkeley, 1981, p. 361).