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Lot Essay
Picasso brought his painting Les Demoiselles d'Avignon to its final stage in the summer of 1907 (Zervos 2*, 18; The Museum of Modern Art, New York). Although it was not exhibited until 1916, word of mouth about its raw subject matter and violent primitivism spread very quickly. Even some of the artist's friends and admirers laughed when they saw it and thought the artist had gone crazy, while others lamented that a great and promising talent had taken a wrong turn. The five prostitutes of Picasso's brothel scene could not fail to provoke, tease or repel whomever confronted them, and the painting served as catalyst to a heated discussion of ideas. The present study was completed little more than a year later, and is one of a rapid sequence of pictures which Les Demoiselles set into motion, resulting in the emergence of Cubism as the dominant pictorial language of its time.
Henri Matisse became angry when he saw Les Demoiselles; ugly as it seemed to him, he thought that Picasso was seeking to upstage the notoriety of his own Nu bleu (Cone Collection, The Baltimore Museum of Art), shown at the Salon des Indépendants in 1907. By this time Georges Braque felt that the Fauvism of Matisse and his circle (of which he was a member), had played itself out. Braque attended the Cézanne commemorative exhibition at the Salon d'Automne in October 1907, and when the poet Guillaume Apollinaire brought Braque the following month to meet Picasso and see Les Demoiselles and Trois Femmes (fig. 1; then in its early stages), Braque understood that a radical analysis of form was the next step.
Braque painted his monumental Grand nu near the end of 1907 (de Romilly and Laude; ex-Collection Alex Maguy, Paris) as a response to Cézanne's bathers and Picasso's Les Demoiselles and Trois Femmes. Picasso was pleased to have a fellow artist as intelligent and perceptive as Braque admire his work, and their friendship gave Picasso increased confidence to continue on his own course and keep working on Trois Femmes, which he found difficult to resolve. Before long, as Picasso later recalled, "Almost every evening, either I went to Braque's studio or Braque came to mine. Each of us had to see what the other had done during the day" (quoted in W. Rubin, Picasso and Braque: Pioneering Cubism, exh. cat., The Museum of Modern Art, New York, 1989, p. 358). One of the results of these useful exchanges was that Picasso's figures began to bear a less overt resemblance to scarified African masks and depended more on a Cézannesque analysis of form and volume, as Braque had advocated.
The spring and summer of 1908 proved to be a difficult time for Picasso. Both he and his mistress Fernande Olivier were fond of indulging in opium and hashish at social gatherings. At a party in late May, Karl-Heinz Wiegels, a young German painter with whom Picasso and Fernande were very close, took narcotics, went out of his senses, and hanged himself several days later. Picasso saw his friend's body dangling in the window. The event seemed a repeat of the death of Picasso's closest friend in Barcelona, Carlos Casagemas, who was similarly addicted to drugs, six years earlier. Fernande later wrote "For some time the studio where he [Wiegels] had died became a place of terror for us, and the poor man appeared to us everywhere, hanging as he had been the last time we saw him" (quoted in J. Richardson, A Life of Picasso, 1907-1917, New York, 1996, vol. II, p. 87).
The summer brought little relief to the anxiety and depression caused by the death of Wiegels. The weather was unbearably hot; Picasso would paint while naked in his studio in the Bateau-Lavoir as Fernande wandered about fanning herself dressed only in a light shift. Picasso had been working in fits and starts on Trois Femmes, largely repainting it each time he returned to it. With it he hoped to challenge the supremacy of Matisse, who had opened his own academy in January 1908 and was to be given a retrospective in the Salon d'Automne later that year. Perhaps in an effort to get some distance on Trois Femmes or to work out some ideas that might help bring that painting to its long-desired conclusion, Picasso, during the summer, commenced work on another large figure composition, Nu dans une forêt (fig. 2), for which the present work is a study.
Nu dans une forêt is also known as La Dryade, after the woodland nymphs of Greek mythology. Most remarkable about this composition, apart from the reduction of the figure into massive, flattened planes, is the ungainly pose of the nymph. She appears to lurch forward as if rising to her feet. In a pencil and ink study in a sketchbook (overlay), the figure in the same pose is seated. John Richardson has identified Picasso's likely source for this positioning of the figure, noting that it may have been derived from the seventh plate from the second book of Andreas Vesalius' De Humani Corporis Fabrica, published in 1543 (fig. 3). The print shows the musculature of a flayed cadaver that the artist has suspended upright with ropes. "How Picasso chanced upon the work of this body-snatching anatomist, who saw his plates benefiting painters and sculptors as well as physicians and surgeons, I do not know. The most likely source would have been Apollinaire, a bibliophile with a taste for antiquarian medical books... Vesalius was the court physician to Charles V and later Philip II... In his originality and vision Vesalius would have had the same appeal for Picasso that another mannerist at the court of Philip II, El Greco, had" (ibid., p. 89).
Once presented with this print Picasso may have been drawn to it for yet another reason, as a reminder of the suicide of his friend Wiegels, whom Picasso last saw as a suspended corpse. Nu dans une forêt may in part be Picasso's attempt to exorcise Wiegel's ghost and submerge the nightmarish event in his painting.
It is unclear precisely when Picasso completed Nu dans une forêt; most scholars agree it was finished during the fall 1908. Picasso and Fernande stayed in Paris through July, and to escape the opressive heat of the city they rented a house in La Rue-des-Bois, a tiny hamlet near Verneuil on the Oise River, where they stayed from early August to early September. Picasso wrote to Leo and Gertrude Stein "This summer in the studio with the heat and so much work to do finally made me ill. I have been here a few days and already feel much better" (quoted in ibid., p. 93). Braque had been painting landscapes which were heavily influenced by Cézanne during the summer in L'Estaque, Cézanne's favorite site on the Mediterranean. Picasso painted mostly landscapes in La Rue-des-Bois. Using these gouaches and panel paintings as a guide, and having seen the landscapes that Braque had brought back with him from L'Estaque, Picasso very likely painted in the landscape background and completed Nu dans une forêt after his return to Paris.
The chief difference between the finished version of Nu dans une forêt and the present study is that the latter contains a second nymph in the upper left section. This figure may have been derived from the central nude in Trois Femmes, with her arms lowered. There are several minor differences in the trees, especially on the left side. The planar aspects in the torso of the Dryad in both oil painting and gouache are generally consistent. Both also show the same positioning of the feet, with the long inside of the foot appearing on the outside, giving the impression that left and right feet have been switched. Whereas the inside of the Dryad's right thigh is fully illuminated in the gouache study, as it would have been seen in natural light; in the oil painting Picasso has shaded it very darkly, an artificial effect which heightens the sculptural aspect of the figure's forms.
The present study may have reflected a stage in the development of the oil painting after Picasso returned to Paris from the countryside and prior its completion. The simple arrangement of tree limbs in the oil painting and the removal of the second nymph from the background emphasizes the frontality of the Dryad and flattens the illusion of space within the picture plane.
When Matisse saw the finally completed Trois Femmes in Picasso's studio in the fall he is said to have laughed. The Salon d'Automne jury, which included Matisse, rejected Braque's L'Estaque landscapes. Daniel-Henry Kahnweiler later showed them in his gallery, and the story goes that Matisse poked fun at them in a little drawing he gave to the critic Louis Vauxcelles (who was responsible for the label "Les Fauves" several years earlier). Matisse described Braque's paintings as being made of "petits cubes". At the time no one could realize the significance of this off-hand gibe. The battle lines for the future of the avant-garde were being drawn.
The first owner of the present work was likely Gertrude Stein. In a letter to Madame Gaffé dated 21 August 1970, William Rubin states, "I promised to send you a picture of Gertrude Stein's living room where your small Picasso hangs". This photograph has been found in the Cone Archives at The Baltimore Museum of Art.
(fig. 1) The present work hanging far left in Gertrude and Leo Stein's studio at 27, rue du Fleurus (detail).
(fig. 2) Pablo Picasso, Trois Femmes, 1908.
Hermitage Museum, St. Petersburg (formerly in the Collection of René Gaffé).
(fig. 3) Pablo Picasso, Nu dans une foret, 1908. Hermitage Museum, St. Petersburg.
(fig. 4) Vesalius, Seventh Plate of the muscles from the second book of De Humani Corporis Fabrica, 1543.
Henri Matisse became angry when he saw Les Demoiselles; ugly as it seemed to him, he thought that Picasso was seeking to upstage the notoriety of his own Nu bleu (Cone Collection, The Baltimore Museum of Art), shown at the Salon des Indépendants in 1907. By this time Georges Braque felt that the Fauvism of Matisse and his circle (of which he was a member), had played itself out. Braque attended the Cézanne commemorative exhibition at the Salon d'Automne in October 1907, and when the poet Guillaume Apollinaire brought Braque the following month to meet Picasso and see Les Demoiselles and Trois Femmes (fig. 1; then in its early stages), Braque understood that a radical analysis of form was the next step.
Braque painted his monumental Grand nu near the end of 1907 (de Romilly and Laude; ex-Collection Alex Maguy, Paris) as a response to Cézanne's bathers and Picasso's Les Demoiselles and Trois Femmes. Picasso was pleased to have a fellow artist as intelligent and perceptive as Braque admire his work, and their friendship gave Picasso increased confidence to continue on his own course and keep working on Trois Femmes, which he found difficult to resolve. Before long, as Picasso later recalled, "Almost every evening, either I went to Braque's studio or Braque came to mine. Each of us had to see what the other had done during the day" (quoted in W. Rubin, Picasso and Braque: Pioneering Cubism, exh. cat., The Museum of Modern Art, New York, 1989, p. 358). One of the results of these useful exchanges was that Picasso's figures began to bear a less overt resemblance to scarified African masks and depended more on a Cézannesque analysis of form and volume, as Braque had advocated.
The spring and summer of 1908 proved to be a difficult time for Picasso. Both he and his mistress Fernande Olivier were fond of indulging in opium and hashish at social gatherings. At a party in late May, Karl-Heinz Wiegels, a young German painter with whom Picasso and Fernande were very close, took narcotics, went out of his senses, and hanged himself several days later. Picasso saw his friend's body dangling in the window. The event seemed a repeat of the death of Picasso's closest friend in Barcelona, Carlos Casagemas, who was similarly addicted to drugs, six years earlier. Fernande later wrote "For some time the studio where he [Wiegels] had died became a place of terror for us, and the poor man appeared to us everywhere, hanging as he had been the last time we saw him" (quoted in J. Richardson, A Life of Picasso, 1907-1917, New York, 1996, vol. II, p. 87).
The summer brought little relief to the anxiety and depression caused by the death of Wiegels. The weather was unbearably hot; Picasso would paint while naked in his studio in the Bateau-Lavoir as Fernande wandered about fanning herself dressed only in a light shift. Picasso had been working in fits and starts on Trois Femmes, largely repainting it each time he returned to it. With it he hoped to challenge the supremacy of Matisse, who had opened his own academy in January 1908 and was to be given a retrospective in the Salon d'Automne later that year. Perhaps in an effort to get some distance on Trois Femmes or to work out some ideas that might help bring that painting to its long-desired conclusion, Picasso, during the summer, commenced work on another large figure composition, Nu dans une forêt (fig. 2), for which the present work is a study.
Nu dans une forêt is also known as La Dryade, after the woodland nymphs of Greek mythology. Most remarkable about this composition, apart from the reduction of the figure into massive, flattened planes, is the ungainly pose of the nymph. She appears to lurch forward as if rising to her feet. In a pencil and ink study in a sketchbook (overlay), the figure in the same pose is seated. John Richardson has identified Picasso's likely source for this positioning of the figure, noting that it may have been derived from the seventh plate from the second book of Andreas Vesalius' De Humani Corporis Fabrica, published in 1543 (fig. 3). The print shows the musculature of a flayed cadaver that the artist has suspended upright with ropes. "How Picasso chanced upon the work of this body-snatching anatomist, who saw his plates benefiting painters and sculptors as well as physicians and surgeons, I do not know. The most likely source would have been Apollinaire, a bibliophile with a taste for antiquarian medical books... Vesalius was the court physician to Charles V and later Philip II... In his originality and vision Vesalius would have had the same appeal for Picasso that another mannerist at the court of Philip II, El Greco, had" (ibid., p. 89).
Once presented with this print Picasso may have been drawn to it for yet another reason, as a reminder of the suicide of his friend Wiegels, whom Picasso last saw as a suspended corpse. Nu dans une forêt may in part be Picasso's attempt to exorcise Wiegel's ghost and submerge the nightmarish event in his painting.
It is unclear precisely when Picasso completed Nu dans une forêt; most scholars agree it was finished during the fall 1908. Picasso and Fernande stayed in Paris through July, and to escape the opressive heat of the city they rented a house in La Rue-des-Bois, a tiny hamlet near Verneuil on the Oise River, where they stayed from early August to early September. Picasso wrote to Leo and Gertrude Stein "This summer in the studio with the heat and so much work to do finally made me ill. I have been here a few days and already feel much better" (quoted in ibid., p. 93). Braque had been painting landscapes which were heavily influenced by Cézanne during the summer in L'Estaque, Cézanne's favorite site on the Mediterranean. Picasso painted mostly landscapes in La Rue-des-Bois. Using these gouaches and panel paintings as a guide, and having seen the landscapes that Braque had brought back with him from L'Estaque, Picasso very likely painted in the landscape background and completed Nu dans une forêt after his return to Paris.
The chief difference between the finished version of Nu dans une forêt and the present study is that the latter contains a second nymph in the upper left section. This figure may have been derived from the central nude in Trois Femmes, with her arms lowered. There are several minor differences in the trees, especially on the left side. The planar aspects in the torso of the Dryad in both oil painting and gouache are generally consistent. Both also show the same positioning of the feet, with the long inside of the foot appearing on the outside, giving the impression that left and right feet have been switched. Whereas the inside of the Dryad's right thigh is fully illuminated in the gouache study, as it would have been seen in natural light; in the oil painting Picasso has shaded it very darkly, an artificial effect which heightens the sculptural aspect of the figure's forms.
The present study may have reflected a stage in the development of the oil painting after Picasso returned to Paris from the countryside and prior its completion. The simple arrangement of tree limbs in the oil painting and the removal of the second nymph from the background emphasizes the frontality of the Dryad and flattens the illusion of space within the picture plane.
When Matisse saw the finally completed Trois Femmes in Picasso's studio in the fall he is said to have laughed. The Salon d'Automne jury, which included Matisse, rejected Braque's L'Estaque landscapes. Daniel-Henry Kahnweiler later showed them in his gallery, and the story goes that Matisse poked fun at them in a little drawing he gave to the critic Louis Vauxcelles (who was responsible for the label "Les Fauves" several years earlier). Matisse described Braque's paintings as being made of "petits cubes". At the time no one could realize the significance of this off-hand gibe. The battle lines for the future of the avant-garde were being drawn.
The first owner of the present work was likely Gertrude Stein. In a letter to Madame Gaffé dated 21 August 1970, William Rubin states, "I promised to send you a picture of Gertrude Stein's living room where your small Picasso hangs". This photograph has been found in the Cone Archives at The Baltimore Museum of Art.
(fig. 1) The present work hanging far left in Gertrude and Leo Stein's studio at 27, rue du Fleurus (detail).
(fig. 2) Pablo Picasso, Trois Femmes, 1908.
Hermitage Museum, St. Petersburg (formerly in the Collection of René Gaffé).
(fig. 3) Pablo Picasso, Nu dans une foret, 1908. Hermitage Museum, St. Petersburg.
(fig. 4) Vesalius, Seventh Plate of the muscles from the second book of De Humani Corporis Fabrica, 1543.