.jpg?w=1)
Lot Essay
The jagged, fractured forms and clash of strident colors in this powerful portrait proclaim its wartime provenance. Moreover, the sitter is immediately recognizable as Dora Maar (fig. 1), Picasso's lover for the past several years, whose visage in those troubled times he subjected to ever increasing and unsparing violence. She had been the 'Weeping Woman' who lamented the slaughter of innocents in the Spanish Civil War (fig. 2). She also bore witness to moments of radiant happiness and repose, recalling the summer of 1937, when, following the completion of Guernica, Picasso and Dora vacationed with friends in Mougins (fig. 3). But now war clouds darkened her face once again, which would in the coming years reflect and express even greater hardships and destruction as the great European powers finally came to blows in global war. John Richardson has pointed out that "After World War II broke out, Picasso came to portray Dora more and more frequently as a sacrificial victim, a tearful symbol of his own pain and grief at the horrors of tyranny and war" (in "Pablo Picasso's Femme au chapeau de paille," Christie's, New York, sale catalogue, 4 May 2004, p. 113).
Picasso was closely attuned to events of the day, and in mid-July 1939, sensing that war was eminent, he sent his mistress Marie-Thérèse Walter and their four-year old daughter Maya to stay in Royan, a coastal resort north of Bordeaux. Ensconced in the villa Gerbier de Joncs, they could enjoy a seaside summer holiday, and they would be safe if war broke out. Indeed, Germany invaded Poland on 1 September. Allied with Poland, Great Britain and France declared war on the aggressor on 3 September. That afternoon Picasso, deeply fearful of an air raid such as that which he recounted in his mural Guernica, warned his secretary Sabartés, "Don't you know that there is the danger German planes will fly over Paris tonight. I'm going right home to pack my baggage. Pack yours and stop fooling, I'll come for you tonight" (quoted in L. C. Gasman, "Death Falling from the Sky: Picasso's Wartime Texts," Picasso and the War Years, exh. cat., Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco, 1998, p. 61). Around midnight, Picasso, his dog Kazbek, Dora, Sabartés and his wife sped off in the artist's Hispano Suiza motor car, driven by his chauffeur Marcel. They arrived in Royan the next morning. Picasso and Dora took rooms at the Hôtel du Tigre. The artist set up his studio in the villa Gerbier des Joncs, where Marie-Thérèse and Maya were staying. Picasso and Sabartés traveled back to Paris on 7 September to obtain the residency permits that would allow them to remain as foreign nationals in Royan, where they returned the following day.
As it turned out, there were limited hostilities on the western front, during the so-called "phony war," until the spring of 1940, when Germany finally invaded The Netherlands, Belgium and France. Picasso made two more trips back to Paris before the end of 1939, to obtain painting supplies--at first he had been limited to simple drawing media and painting in gouache in Royan--and to store his paintings in a bank vault. Buste de femme was painted on the eve of the last of these trips, which lasted from 5-21 December. The subjects that Picasso painted that fall in Royan and Paris describe the small, circumscribed world, a domestic coterie comprised of his two mistresses, his child, and his secretary, that the artist had drawn around himself and anxiously guarded from the menace of cataclysmic events that were by now beyond anyone's control. There is a portrait of Marie-Thérèse (Zervos, vol. 9, no. 334) and two of Maya (Z., vol. 9, nos. 332-333), which in their relative naturalism seem to nostalgically betoken the peace and serenity of an earlier time. There are a group of pictures showing two women (Z., vol. 9, nos. 335-337, 339-341), in which artist may have wishfully imagined a conciliation between his past and present lovers, whose close proximity to each other in Royan had now quickly become a source of anxiety for all concerned. Picasso painted Sabartés, dressed as a Spanish cavalier, in October during a trip to Paris (Z., vol. 9, no. 366). He also painted still-lifes of flayed sheep's heads (Z., vol. 9, nos. 348-351; and vol. X, no.122), the first of his morbid, wartime memento mori images (fig. 4).
Portraits of Dora predominated. She again became the chief intermediary through whom Picasso reflected on current events, and he continued to alter and reshape her visage to mirror what he saw and felt. He made her nose even more prominent than before, so that it became an almost elephantine proboscis, which commentators have likened to the Afghan hound Kazbek's long snout or those of the sheep's heads. Picasso gradually shifted Dora's head within this ongoing sequence of portraits from a leftward-facing three-quarter view to a more frontal pose, as seen in the present painting. This view incorporates both her frontal aspect and profile simultaneously, a compositional device that Picasso favored periodically from the mid-1920s onward. Here, however, synthesis of form has been overturned into an act of utter, wanton destruction: Dora's face appears to have been split in half, resulting in a gaping wound, as if someone had taken an axe to her head.
This portrait is filled with sharp, broken, shard-like forms, a motif that is repeated throughout, such as in the diamond-shaped finials on the chair posts and in the pattern of the wallpaper. The most dramatically rendered accessory is Dora's hat, which by now had become a regular feature in Picasso's depictions of her and a symbolic extension of her inner angst. Brigitte Léal has called the hat Dora's "most provocative emblem--A crown of daffodils, an urchin's beret, or a cool straw hat for Marie-Thérèse, painted like a Manet; nets, veils and the great wings of a voracious insect for Dora: even their respective ornaments point to the glaring differences in the temperament between the two women" (in "For Charming Dora: Portraits of Dora Maar," Picasso and Portraiture, exh. cat., The Museum of Modern Art, New York, 1996, pp. 387, 389 and 392). Dora's hats soon acquired an especially belligerent aspect during the early months of the war: they sometimes resemble the silhouettes of warships seen on the horizon, or as here, a twin-engined German Heinkel bomber, that fearsome sower of destruction that Picasso had so come to dread. The flowers that adorn Dora's hat spin like propellers; the descending shapes on the wall are like the bomber's rain of death, or are they Dora's tears of grief? Mme Léal has written:
The innumerable very different portraits that Picasso did of her remain among the finest achievements of his art, at a time when he was engaged in a sort of third path, verging on Surrealist representation while rejecting strict representation, and, naturally, abstraction. Today, more than ever, the fascination that the image of this admirable, but suffering and alienated face exerts on us incontestably ensues from its coinciding with our modern consciousness of the body in its threefold dimension of precariousness, ambiguity and monstrosity. There is no doubt that in signing these portraits, Picasso tolled the final bell for the reign of ideal beauty and opened the way for the aesthetic tyranny of a sort of terrible and tragic beauty, the fruit of our contemporary history (in ibid., p. 385).
(fig. 1) Dora Maar, circa 1941, photograph by Rogi André. Cabinet des Estampes et de la Photogaphie, Bibliothèque Nationale de France, Paris. BARCODE 23661776
(fig. 2) Pablo Picasso, La femme qui pleure, 26 October 1937. Tate Gallery, London. BARCODE 23662100
(fig. 3) Pablo Picasso, Femme assise, 1937. Museé Picasso, Paris. BARCODE 23662094
(fig. 4) Pablo Picasso, Crâne de mouton, 4 October 1939. Musée des Beaux-Arts, Lyon. BARCODE 23662087
Picasso was closely attuned to events of the day, and in mid-July 1939, sensing that war was eminent, he sent his mistress Marie-Thérèse Walter and their four-year old daughter Maya to stay in Royan, a coastal resort north of Bordeaux. Ensconced in the villa Gerbier de Joncs, they could enjoy a seaside summer holiday, and they would be safe if war broke out. Indeed, Germany invaded Poland on 1 September. Allied with Poland, Great Britain and France declared war on the aggressor on 3 September. That afternoon Picasso, deeply fearful of an air raid such as that which he recounted in his mural Guernica, warned his secretary Sabartés, "Don't you know that there is the danger German planes will fly over Paris tonight. I'm going right home to pack my baggage. Pack yours and stop fooling, I'll come for you tonight" (quoted in L. C. Gasman, "Death Falling from the Sky: Picasso's Wartime Texts," Picasso and the War Years, exh. cat., Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco, 1998, p. 61). Around midnight, Picasso, his dog Kazbek, Dora, Sabartés and his wife sped off in the artist's Hispano Suiza motor car, driven by his chauffeur Marcel. They arrived in Royan the next morning. Picasso and Dora took rooms at the Hôtel du Tigre. The artist set up his studio in the villa Gerbier des Joncs, where Marie-Thérèse and Maya were staying. Picasso and Sabartés traveled back to Paris on 7 September to obtain the residency permits that would allow them to remain as foreign nationals in Royan, where they returned the following day.
As it turned out, there were limited hostilities on the western front, during the so-called "phony war," until the spring of 1940, when Germany finally invaded The Netherlands, Belgium and France. Picasso made two more trips back to Paris before the end of 1939, to obtain painting supplies--at first he had been limited to simple drawing media and painting in gouache in Royan--and to store his paintings in a bank vault. Buste de femme was painted on the eve of the last of these trips, which lasted from 5-21 December. The subjects that Picasso painted that fall in Royan and Paris describe the small, circumscribed world, a domestic coterie comprised of his two mistresses, his child, and his secretary, that the artist had drawn around himself and anxiously guarded from the menace of cataclysmic events that were by now beyond anyone's control. There is a portrait of Marie-Thérèse (Zervos, vol. 9, no. 334) and two of Maya (Z., vol. 9, nos. 332-333), which in their relative naturalism seem to nostalgically betoken the peace and serenity of an earlier time. There are a group of pictures showing two women (Z., vol. 9, nos. 335-337, 339-341), in which artist may have wishfully imagined a conciliation between his past and present lovers, whose close proximity to each other in Royan had now quickly become a source of anxiety for all concerned. Picasso painted Sabartés, dressed as a Spanish cavalier, in October during a trip to Paris (Z., vol. 9, no. 366). He also painted still-lifes of flayed sheep's heads (Z., vol. 9, nos. 348-351; and vol. X, no.122), the first of his morbid, wartime memento mori images (fig. 4).
Portraits of Dora predominated. She again became the chief intermediary through whom Picasso reflected on current events, and he continued to alter and reshape her visage to mirror what he saw and felt. He made her nose even more prominent than before, so that it became an almost elephantine proboscis, which commentators have likened to the Afghan hound Kazbek's long snout or those of the sheep's heads. Picasso gradually shifted Dora's head within this ongoing sequence of portraits from a leftward-facing three-quarter view to a more frontal pose, as seen in the present painting. This view incorporates both her frontal aspect and profile simultaneously, a compositional device that Picasso favored periodically from the mid-1920s onward. Here, however, synthesis of form has been overturned into an act of utter, wanton destruction: Dora's face appears to have been split in half, resulting in a gaping wound, as if someone had taken an axe to her head.
This portrait is filled with sharp, broken, shard-like forms, a motif that is repeated throughout, such as in the diamond-shaped finials on the chair posts and in the pattern of the wallpaper. The most dramatically rendered accessory is Dora's hat, which by now had become a regular feature in Picasso's depictions of her and a symbolic extension of her inner angst. Brigitte Léal has called the hat Dora's "most provocative emblem--A crown of daffodils, an urchin's beret, or a cool straw hat for Marie-Thérèse, painted like a Manet; nets, veils and the great wings of a voracious insect for Dora: even their respective ornaments point to the glaring differences in the temperament between the two women" (in "For Charming Dora: Portraits of Dora Maar," Picasso and Portraiture, exh. cat., The Museum of Modern Art, New York, 1996, pp. 387, 389 and 392). Dora's hats soon acquired an especially belligerent aspect during the early months of the war: they sometimes resemble the silhouettes of warships seen on the horizon, or as here, a twin-engined German Heinkel bomber, that fearsome sower of destruction that Picasso had so come to dread. The flowers that adorn Dora's hat spin like propellers; the descending shapes on the wall are like the bomber's rain of death, or are they Dora's tears of grief? Mme Léal has written:
The innumerable very different portraits that Picasso did of her remain among the finest achievements of his art, at a time when he was engaged in a sort of third path, verging on Surrealist representation while rejecting strict representation, and, naturally, abstraction. Today, more than ever, the fascination that the image of this admirable, but suffering and alienated face exerts on us incontestably ensues from its coinciding with our modern consciousness of the body in its threefold dimension of precariousness, ambiguity and monstrosity. There is no doubt that in signing these portraits, Picasso tolled the final bell for the reign of ideal beauty and opened the way for the aesthetic tyranny of a sort of terrible and tragic beauty, the fruit of our contemporary history (in ibid., p. 385).
(fig. 1) Dora Maar, circa 1941, photograph by Rogi André. Cabinet des Estampes et de la Photogaphie, Bibliothèque Nationale de France, Paris. BARCODE 23661776
(fig. 2) Pablo Picasso, La femme qui pleure, 26 October 1937. Tate Gallery, London. BARCODE 23662100
(fig. 3) Pablo Picasso, Femme assise, 1937. Museé Picasso, Paris. BARCODE 23662094
(fig. 4) Pablo Picasso, Crâne de mouton, 4 October 1939. Musée des Beaux-Arts, Lyon. BARCODE 23662087