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Lot Essay
Picasso had been pursuing, for more than two years, his extra-marital, amorous obsession with Marie-Thérèse Walter–then still several months shy of her 20th birthday—when on the evening of 4 April 1929 he painted her reclining on a divan, nude except for a pearl necklace, as if awaiting the approach of her lover, her body awash and aglow in the light of a full moon streaming through the balcony window of her new Paris apartment.
While Picasso had every reason to savor the lyrical, romantic nature of this experience, he never allowed such sentiments to distract him from his unrelenting proclivity for formal experiment and invention. Contravening any accustomed notion of aesthetic beauty or erotic appeal, Picasso impressed upon this scene a radical, surrealist re-configuration of the female form and sexuality. The result is irrationally exaggerated, graphic, and uncompromising, stemming only from the deepest, wildest inclinations of the artist’s irrepressible imagination. Picasso has here clearly set aside the more decorous lineaments of classicism that had prevailed in his art of the early 1920s. He instead brought forth a subversive, monstrous beauty, sprung from the innermost, darkest realm of the subconscious. This development was conclusive; he had created a new pictorial reality.
The transgressive plasticity of this new figuration stemmed in part from Picasso’s recent work in sculpture, as seen in Metamorphosis I and II (spring, 1928; Musée Picasso, Paris). This inspiration had already become apparent in the bathers Picasso painted and drew in Dinard during the summer of 1928, where in the fierce glare of sun, sky, and strand, he subjected the athletic figure of Marie-Thérèse to a series of elasticized, protean variations. In Femme couchée and other works of early April 1929, Picasso first employed this new conception away from the beach, within the setting of the cosmopolitan Paris interior (Zervos, vol. 7, nos. 260, 269, and 270).
While vacationing with his wife Olga and son Paulo at the Dinard seashore, Picasso hid Marie-Thérèse in a nearby hostel and saw her on the sly. In Paris he needed a new hideaway apartment for trysting with his mistress. From an address on the rue de Liège, Picasso moved Marie-Thérèse during the early spring of 1929 to larger and more finely-appointed quarters on the Left Bank, likely located at the corner of rue de l’Université and rue Courty (J. Richardson, A Life of Picasso: The Triumphant Years, New York, 2007, p. 372). Here, a half-hour walk from the artist’s home on the rue de la Boétie, Picasso could meet with Marie-Thérèse with little fear of being discovered, where he could also more easily draw and paint her.
The paintings of sharp-beaked and toothy angry heads that represent Olga in early 1929 gave way to the interiors with Marie-Thérèse, as seen here, together with the reappearance of bathers, for Picasso a pleasant reminder of the previous summer in Dinard. And to Dinard Picasso, Olga, Paulo would return during the summer of 1929, with Marie-Thérèse again secretly lodged nearby.
While Picasso had every reason to savor the lyrical, romantic nature of this experience, he never allowed such sentiments to distract him from his unrelenting proclivity for formal experiment and invention. Contravening any accustomed notion of aesthetic beauty or erotic appeal, Picasso impressed upon this scene a radical, surrealist re-configuration of the female form and sexuality. The result is irrationally exaggerated, graphic, and uncompromising, stemming only from the deepest, wildest inclinations of the artist’s irrepressible imagination. Picasso has here clearly set aside the more decorous lineaments of classicism that had prevailed in his art of the early 1920s. He instead brought forth a subversive, monstrous beauty, sprung from the innermost, darkest realm of the subconscious. This development was conclusive; he had created a new pictorial reality.
The transgressive plasticity of this new figuration stemmed in part from Picasso’s recent work in sculpture, as seen in Metamorphosis I and II (spring, 1928; Musée Picasso, Paris). This inspiration had already become apparent in the bathers Picasso painted and drew in Dinard during the summer of 1928, where in the fierce glare of sun, sky, and strand, he subjected the athletic figure of Marie-Thérèse to a series of elasticized, protean variations. In Femme couchée and other works of early April 1929, Picasso first employed this new conception away from the beach, within the setting of the cosmopolitan Paris interior (Zervos, vol. 7, nos. 260, 269, and 270).
While vacationing with his wife Olga and son Paulo at the Dinard seashore, Picasso hid Marie-Thérèse in a nearby hostel and saw her on the sly. In Paris he needed a new hideaway apartment for trysting with his mistress. From an address on the rue de Liège, Picasso moved Marie-Thérèse during the early spring of 1929 to larger and more finely-appointed quarters on the Left Bank, likely located at the corner of rue de l’Université and rue Courty (J. Richardson, A Life of Picasso: The Triumphant Years, New York, 2007, p. 372). Here, a half-hour walk from the artist’s home on the rue de la Boétie, Picasso could meet with Marie-Thérèse with little fear of being discovered, where he could also more easily draw and paint her.
The paintings of sharp-beaked and toothy angry heads that represent Olga in early 1929 gave way to the interiors with Marie-Thérèse, as seen here, together with the reappearance of bathers, for Picasso a pleasant reminder of the previous summer in Dinard. And to Dinard Picasso, Olga, Paulo would return during the summer of 1929, with Marie-Thérèse again secretly lodged nearby.