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Lot Essay
Painted in a resplendent array of vibrant tones, Femme à la coiffe d’Arlésienne sur fond vert (Lee Miller) is one of an important series of seven portraits that Pablo Picasso painted of the celebrated American photographer Lee Miller over the course of a sun-filled sojourn during the summer of 1937. This was a landmark year within Picasso’s career, marked by an intense surge of creativity in response to contemporary events, which saw the creation of some of his most important works: Guernica (Zervos, vol. 9, no. 65; Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofía, Madrid) was completed in the spring, while the haunting La femme qui pleure (Zervos, vol. 9, no. 73; Tate, London) reached its final iteration in the fall. Alongside these monumental works, a dazzling array of portraits occupied Picasso’s imagination, ranging from sensuous depictions of Marie-Thérèse Walter, to highly charged portrayals of Dora Maar, and boldly colored images of close friends and acquaintances. Most notable are the dynamic series of paintings Picasso created of the group of Surrealist artists, photographers and writers he spent the summer with in the south of France that year, each a testament to the highly creative environment and fruitful friendships that underpinned this trip.
The artist had departed Paris just two weeks after he presented the finished Guernica at the Exposition Universelle, traveling with Maar to Mougins—a small, hilltop village overlooking the Mediterranean—in search of sunshine and respite. Here, they joined the poet Paul Eluard and his wife Nusch, Man Ray and Ady Fidelin, the British Surrealist Eileen Agar and her husband the writer Joseph Bard, and Roland Penrose and his new partner, Lee Miller. Man Ray later recalled, “We all stayed at a pension hotel, the Hôtel Vaste Horizon, back in the country in Mougins, above Antibes… After a morning on the beach and a leisurely lunch, we retired to our respective rooms for a siesta and perhaps love making. But we worked, too. In the evening Eluard read us his latest poem, Picasso showed us his starry-eyed portrait of Dora” (quoted in Picasso and the Camera, exh. cat., Gagosian, New York, 2014, p. 231).
Miller had only met Penrose a few months before the Mougins trip, following her return to Paris, a city she adored and had called home for several years during the early 1930s. She had first visited the French capital in 1925, aged 18, and was immediately intoxicated by the world of art and bohemianism that she found there. Upon returning to New York, she was discovered by the publishing magnate, Condé Nast, who encouraged her to pursue a modeling career, leading to her appearance on the cover of Vogue in March 1927. Soon, however, Miller decided she would “rather take a picture than be one,” and set out for the French capital again in 1929, armed with an introduction to Man Ray from Edward Steichen and an ambition to become a photographer herself. She met the American Surrealist photographer by chance in a café. “I told him boldly that I was his new student,” she later recalled. “He said he didn’t take students, and anyway he was leaving Paris for his holiday. I said, I know, I’m going with you—and I did” (quoted in A. Penrose, The Lives of Lee Miller, London, 1999, p. 25).
Man Ray agreed to Miller’s request, and the pair soon became lovers. While she posed for him frequently, the two also collaborated on innovative photography projects—most famously developing the solarization technique together. After almost a year working in his studio, Miller began to take on her own projects, and in 1932 she left Man Ray and returned home to New York, where she set up her own photography studio. The lure of Paris did not wane however, and finally in 1937 she arrived once more in the city, and was immediately re-immersed in the Surrealist world she had once inhabited. Attending a fancy-dress ball alongside the likes of Max Ernst, Georges Bataille, and gallerist Julien Levy, she was introduced to Penrose, who had come, together with Ernst, dressed as a beggar. “Blond, blue-eyed and responsive she seemed to enjoy the abysmal contrast between her elegance and my own slum-like horror,” Penrose later wrote (quoted in ibid., p. 74).
Two weeks later, Penrose and Miller returned to his native England together and the pair traveled with Man Ray and Ady Fidelin to Truro, in Cornwall, where they met up with the Eluards, Ernst and Leonora Carrington, as well as Herbert Read, E.L.T Mesens, and Agar. A month later, many of this coterie of writers, artists and poets regathered, this time in Mougins, where they were joined by Picasso and Maar. Far removed from the ever worsening political situation in Europe, Mougins offered them an escape, and the group spent a carefree, creatively fertile and liberating summer together. Evocative photographs taken by Miller, Maar and Agar immortalize this summer sojourn, recording the languorous lunches, days spent on the beach, meandering adventures through the surrounding countryside, and conversations beneath the striped shadows cast by the cane trellis of the hotel terrace.
Using his hotel room as a make-shift studio, Picasso painted numerous color-filled portraits of his companions over the course of this vacation, driven by what Penrose has described as “a diabolical playfulness” (Picasso: His Life and Work, London, 1958, p. 279). Nusch was depicted wearing an elaborate Niçoise hat in Portrait de Nusch Eluard (Museum Berggruen, Berlin), her face covered in garish make-up, while Paul was transformed into a fantastical female peasant in La femme au chat (Zervos, vol. 8, no. 373; Private collection). Picasso doesn’t appear to have painted these works from life but rather, having absorbed the likeness and character of his chosen sitter during the hours they spent together during the group’s activities and outings, translating their likeness through his own, unique pictorial language, to create a humorous caricature-like image. Miller became Picasso’s primary focus towards the end of the summer—the artist was said to have been captivated by her classical beauty, her striking intellect and her deeply creative spirit. Beginning in early September, he commenced a group of seated portraits, each of which show Miller in the quintessential Arlésienne costume, featuring most prominently the ribbon-trimmed headdress.
The artist appears to have relished the very act of painting in these works, boldly exploring and playing with the materiality of his paints. In Femme à la coiffe d’Arlésienne sur fond vert (Lee Miller) Picasso transforms Miller through a vibrant, fantastical palette—her torso is recorded in a colorful weave of linear stripes of pigment, the thick strokes of paint deliberately allowed to drip freely, recording an impression of the speed and energy with which Picasso attacked the canvas. Penrose, describing his first encounter with one of these paintings of Miller, explained: “On a bright pink background Lee appeared in profile, her face a brilliant yellow like the sun with no modeling. Two smiling eyes and a green mouth were placed on the same side of the face, and her breasts seemed like the sails of ships filled with a joyous breeze. It was an astonishing likeness. An agglomeration of Lee’s qualities of exuberant vitality and vivid beauty put together in such a way that it was undoubtedly her but with none of the conventional attributions of a portrait” (ibid., p. 109).
While Picasso’s decision to dress Miller (and also Paul Eluard) in the traditional costume of the Arlésienne may have been prompted by the local festivals taking place in Mougins, Arles and Nice that summer, the works also clearly pay homage to Vincent van Gogh’s series of striking portraits depicting Madame Ginoux from 1888, the owner of the Café de la Gare in Arles. While Picasso had long revered Van Gogh’s visceral, expressionistic take on the world, the Exposition Universelle of 1937 had included a large exhibition of Impressionist, Post-Impressionist and modern art together. Here, Picasso was able to regard his own work in the same context as Van Gogh, prompting him perhaps to return once again to the Dutch master’s work for inspiration, aided by postcard reproductions of several of Van Gogh’s compositions. It was also during this pivotal summer of 1937 that Picasso learned that he, like Van Gogh, had been branded a “degenerate artist” by Hitler, and that the Nazis had begun to confiscate works, including his own, from German museums and collections. By deliberately invoking and appropriating the work of Van Gogh, Picasso appears to not only pay homage to the artist, but also demonstrate, in the face of derision, their shared status as defiant trailblazers of avant-garde art.
While Picasso and Miller remained close following the summer of 1937, the outbreak of the Second World War two years later cut off all contact between the two. Picasso remained in Paris for much of the conflict, holed up in his Left Bank studio, while Miller initially returned to England with Penrose, before becoming a photojournalist for Condé Nast. In 1944 she received her accreditation from the US Army and became one of only a handful of female combat war correspondents to cover the front-lines of the war in Europe. With an unflinching eye, she recorded the siege of Saint-Malo, fighting in Alsace, and later, Hitler’s apartment in Munich, as well as the liberation of the concentration camps of Dachau and Buchenwald.
It was while covering the chaos that followed the Liberation of Paris that she set out to find news of Picasso, racing through streets littered with still smoking tanks to reach the artist’s studio. “Picasso and I fell into each other’s arms,” Miller wrote in her dispatch from Paris, “and between laughter and tears, we incoherently exchanged news about friends and their work, and looked at his new pictures, some of them painted while the Battle of Paris raged” (“In Paris… Picasso Still at Work” in Vogue, vol. 104, no. 7, 15 October 1944, p. 98). The artist’s joy at the Liberation and being reunited with his old friend can be palpably felt in the photographs from their meeting, the most iconic of which sees the artist embracing Miller in her uniform, gazing adoringly up at her face in apparent disbelief at her presence.
The artist had departed Paris just two weeks after he presented the finished Guernica at the Exposition Universelle, traveling with Maar to Mougins—a small, hilltop village overlooking the Mediterranean—in search of sunshine and respite. Here, they joined the poet Paul Eluard and his wife Nusch, Man Ray and Ady Fidelin, the British Surrealist Eileen Agar and her husband the writer Joseph Bard, and Roland Penrose and his new partner, Lee Miller. Man Ray later recalled, “We all stayed at a pension hotel, the Hôtel Vaste Horizon, back in the country in Mougins, above Antibes… After a morning on the beach and a leisurely lunch, we retired to our respective rooms for a siesta and perhaps love making. But we worked, too. In the evening Eluard read us his latest poem, Picasso showed us his starry-eyed portrait of Dora” (quoted in Picasso and the Camera, exh. cat., Gagosian, New York, 2014, p. 231).
Miller had only met Penrose a few months before the Mougins trip, following her return to Paris, a city she adored and had called home for several years during the early 1930s. She had first visited the French capital in 1925, aged 18, and was immediately intoxicated by the world of art and bohemianism that she found there. Upon returning to New York, she was discovered by the publishing magnate, Condé Nast, who encouraged her to pursue a modeling career, leading to her appearance on the cover of Vogue in March 1927. Soon, however, Miller decided she would “rather take a picture than be one,” and set out for the French capital again in 1929, armed with an introduction to Man Ray from Edward Steichen and an ambition to become a photographer herself. She met the American Surrealist photographer by chance in a café. “I told him boldly that I was his new student,” she later recalled. “He said he didn’t take students, and anyway he was leaving Paris for his holiday. I said, I know, I’m going with you—and I did” (quoted in A. Penrose, The Lives of Lee Miller, London, 1999, p. 25).
Man Ray agreed to Miller’s request, and the pair soon became lovers. While she posed for him frequently, the two also collaborated on innovative photography projects—most famously developing the solarization technique together. After almost a year working in his studio, Miller began to take on her own projects, and in 1932 she left Man Ray and returned home to New York, where she set up her own photography studio. The lure of Paris did not wane however, and finally in 1937 she arrived once more in the city, and was immediately re-immersed in the Surrealist world she had once inhabited. Attending a fancy-dress ball alongside the likes of Max Ernst, Georges Bataille, and gallerist Julien Levy, she was introduced to Penrose, who had come, together with Ernst, dressed as a beggar. “Blond, blue-eyed and responsive she seemed to enjoy the abysmal contrast between her elegance and my own slum-like horror,” Penrose later wrote (quoted in ibid., p. 74).
Two weeks later, Penrose and Miller returned to his native England together and the pair traveled with Man Ray and Ady Fidelin to Truro, in Cornwall, where they met up with the Eluards, Ernst and Leonora Carrington, as well as Herbert Read, E.L.T Mesens, and Agar. A month later, many of this coterie of writers, artists and poets regathered, this time in Mougins, where they were joined by Picasso and Maar. Far removed from the ever worsening political situation in Europe, Mougins offered them an escape, and the group spent a carefree, creatively fertile and liberating summer together. Evocative photographs taken by Miller, Maar and Agar immortalize this summer sojourn, recording the languorous lunches, days spent on the beach, meandering adventures through the surrounding countryside, and conversations beneath the striped shadows cast by the cane trellis of the hotel terrace.
Using his hotel room as a make-shift studio, Picasso painted numerous color-filled portraits of his companions over the course of this vacation, driven by what Penrose has described as “a diabolical playfulness” (Picasso: His Life and Work, London, 1958, p. 279). Nusch was depicted wearing an elaborate Niçoise hat in Portrait de Nusch Eluard (Museum Berggruen, Berlin), her face covered in garish make-up, while Paul was transformed into a fantastical female peasant in La femme au chat (Zervos, vol. 8, no. 373; Private collection). Picasso doesn’t appear to have painted these works from life but rather, having absorbed the likeness and character of his chosen sitter during the hours they spent together during the group’s activities and outings, translating their likeness through his own, unique pictorial language, to create a humorous caricature-like image. Miller became Picasso’s primary focus towards the end of the summer—the artist was said to have been captivated by her classical beauty, her striking intellect and her deeply creative spirit. Beginning in early September, he commenced a group of seated portraits, each of which show Miller in the quintessential Arlésienne costume, featuring most prominently the ribbon-trimmed headdress.
The artist appears to have relished the very act of painting in these works, boldly exploring and playing with the materiality of his paints. In Femme à la coiffe d’Arlésienne sur fond vert (Lee Miller) Picasso transforms Miller through a vibrant, fantastical palette—her torso is recorded in a colorful weave of linear stripes of pigment, the thick strokes of paint deliberately allowed to drip freely, recording an impression of the speed and energy with which Picasso attacked the canvas. Penrose, describing his first encounter with one of these paintings of Miller, explained: “On a bright pink background Lee appeared in profile, her face a brilliant yellow like the sun with no modeling. Two smiling eyes and a green mouth were placed on the same side of the face, and her breasts seemed like the sails of ships filled with a joyous breeze. It was an astonishing likeness. An agglomeration of Lee’s qualities of exuberant vitality and vivid beauty put together in such a way that it was undoubtedly her but with none of the conventional attributions of a portrait” (ibid., p. 109).
While Picasso’s decision to dress Miller (and also Paul Eluard) in the traditional costume of the Arlésienne may have been prompted by the local festivals taking place in Mougins, Arles and Nice that summer, the works also clearly pay homage to Vincent van Gogh’s series of striking portraits depicting Madame Ginoux from 1888, the owner of the Café de la Gare in Arles. While Picasso had long revered Van Gogh’s visceral, expressionistic take on the world, the Exposition Universelle of 1937 had included a large exhibition of Impressionist, Post-Impressionist and modern art together. Here, Picasso was able to regard his own work in the same context as Van Gogh, prompting him perhaps to return once again to the Dutch master’s work for inspiration, aided by postcard reproductions of several of Van Gogh’s compositions. It was also during this pivotal summer of 1937 that Picasso learned that he, like Van Gogh, had been branded a “degenerate artist” by Hitler, and that the Nazis had begun to confiscate works, including his own, from German museums and collections. By deliberately invoking and appropriating the work of Van Gogh, Picasso appears to not only pay homage to the artist, but also demonstrate, in the face of derision, their shared status as defiant trailblazers of avant-garde art.
While Picasso and Miller remained close following the summer of 1937, the outbreak of the Second World War two years later cut off all contact between the two. Picasso remained in Paris for much of the conflict, holed up in his Left Bank studio, while Miller initially returned to England with Penrose, before becoming a photojournalist for Condé Nast. In 1944 she received her accreditation from the US Army and became one of only a handful of female combat war correspondents to cover the front-lines of the war in Europe. With an unflinching eye, she recorded the siege of Saint-Malo, fighting in Alsace, and later, Hitler’s apartment in Munich, as well as the liberation of the concentration camps of Dachau and Buchenwald.
It was while covering the chaos that followed the Liberation of Paris that she set out to find news of Picasso, racing through streets littered with still smoking tanks to reach the artist’s studio. “Picasso and I fell into each other’s arms,” Miller wrote in her dispatch from Paris, “and between laughter and tears, we incoherently exchanged news about friends and their work, and looked at his new pictures, some of them painted while the Battle of Paris raged” (“In Paris… Picasso Still at Work” in Vogue, vol. 104, no. 7, 15 October 1944, p. 98). The artist’s joy at the Liberation and being reunited with his old friend can be palpably felt in the photographs from their meeting, the most iconic of which sees the artist embracing Miller in her uniform, gazing adoringly up at her face in apparent disbelief at her presence.