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Lot Essay
Pablo Picasso painted this prismatic view of Paris’s great cathedral, Notre-Dame de Paris, on 1 March 1945. As the Allies pushed their way further into Germany, Picasso remained as he had for the duration of the War—holed up in his large Left Bank home on the rue des Grands Augustins. Paris had been liberated from Nazi occupation the previous summer and Picasso continued to work with an impassioned energy through the new year, primarily painting the immediate world around him—still lifes, portraits, and occasionally, landscapes.
Vue de Notre-Dame de Paris is one of a series of paintings that Picasso had begun in the spring of 1944 and continued again in 1945, in which he turned to the city’s beloved monument as his subject. Presiding over the eastern end of the Ile de la Cité, the Gothic towers of the western façade staunchly resolute and spire soaring heavenwards, Notre-Dame stood—as it remains today—as a symbol both of the city and the nation as a whole. On 25 August 1944, as French and American troops entered Paris, the bells of Notre-Dame rang out to mark the city’s liberation. The next day, the cathedral stood as the center point of Charles de Gaulle’s celebrations, with huge crowds gathered to witness a special mass held there.
There is no doubt that Picasso would have heard the bells of Notre-Dame from his studio, which was located just across the river from the Ile de la Cité, not far from the Pont Saint-Michel. Like his great friend and rival, Henri Matisse, who had likewise painted Notre-Dame from a similar viewpoint in his Vue de Notre-Dame de Paris of 1914 (The Museum of Modern Art, New York), Picasso could not have avoided the presence of the towering cathedral. In his first 1944 depictions of this cityscape, Picasso captured a more panoramic eastern-looking view, including the cathedral amid the skyline of Paris, as well as, in two of the works, seen through one of the arches of the Pont Saint-Michel. When he returned to this motif the following year, Picasso continued to depict the cathedral from this direction, incorporating, somewhat implausibly in two of the canvases, the luminous façade of Sacré Coeur in the distance.
In the present Vue de Notre-Dame de Paris, the most abstracted rendering of this vista, Picasso honed in more closely on the cathedral itself, distilling the scene into a grid-like composition of interlocking facets, each demarcated with a bold black line. Through Picasso’s gaze, this composite view was transformed into an array of shapes. The curving lines at the bottom of the canvas evoke the arches of the bridges, while in the center, Picasso captured in his signature pictorial shorthand the forms of two of the portals and the rose window on the façade of the cathedral, while the spire rises up through the light blue shards of the sky to a luminous white plane above. Picasso had been developing this bold, angular form of pictorial construction throughout the war years. His still lifes, and to a certain extent, his portraits, of this period are all portrayed with the same tight sense of stasis, as objects are locked in upon the surface of the canvas.
This was not the first time that Picasso had turned to the city as a subject for his work during the War. In 1943, he painted a series of paintings that depicted the Vert-Galant, a small park situated at the western tip of the Ile de la Cité. When asked by André Malraux why he turned to the landscape at this time—a relatively rare genre in the artist’s oeuvre—Picasso explained that because he was unable to travel, he instead took frequent walks around the city. “One day all these things registered in me, unbeknownst to me,” he recalled, “they began to come out” (quoted in M.C. Cone, Artists under Vichy: A Case of Prejudice and Persecution, Princeton, 1992, p. 139). As Picasso’s statement demonstrates, he did not paint his wartime cityscapes en plein air. Rather than being topographically accurate they are instead remembered images of his surroundings, composites of time and place that the artist reconstructed upon his canvas.
While Notre-Dame was undoubtedly a conveniently located motif for the artist, its symbolism as a beacon of French culture, humanity and religion had a powerful resonance at this time. In choosing to paint this landmark, Picasso was capturing the beauty of his adopted home as it emerged triumphant from the War, immortalizing in paint the endurance of the human spirit.
Vue de Notre-Dame de Paris is one of a series of paintings that Picasso had begun in the spring of 1944 and continued again in 1945, in which he turned to the city’s beloved monument as his subject. Presiding over the eastern end of the Ile de la Cité, the Gothic towers of the western façade staunchly resolute and spire soaring heavenwards, Notre-Dame stood—as it remains today—as a symbol both of the city and the nation as a whole. On 25 August 1944, as French and American troops entered Paris, the bells of Notre-Dame rang out to mark the city’s liberation. The next day, the cathedral stood as the center point of Charles de Gaulle’s celebrations, with huge crowds gathered to witness a special mass held there.
There is no doubt that Picasso would have heard the bells of Notre-Dame from his studio, which was located just across the river from the Ile de la Cité, not far from the Pont Saint-Michel. Like his great friend and rival, Henri Matisse, who had likewise painted Notre-Dame from a similar viewpoint in his Vue de Notre-Dame de Paris of 1914 (The Museum of Modern Art, New York), Picasso could not have avoided the presence of the towering cathedral. In his first 1944 depictions of this cityscape, Picasso captured a more panoramic eastern-looking view, including the cathedral amid the skyline of Paris, as well as, in two of the works, seen through one of the arches of the Pont Saint-Michel. When he returned to this motif the following year, Picasso continued to depict the cathedral from this direction, incorporating, somewhat implausibly in two of the canvases, the luminous façade of Sacré Coeur in the distance.
In the present Vue de Notre-Dame de Paris, the most abstracted rendering of this vista, Picasso honed in more closely on the cathedral itself, distilling the scene into a grid-like composition of interlocking facets, each demarcated with a bold black line. Through Picasso’s gaze, this composite view was transformed into an array of shapes. The curving lines at the bottom of the canvas evoke the arches of the bridges, while in the center, Picasso captured in his signature pictorial shorthand the forms of two of the portals and the rose window on the façade of the cathedral, while the spire rises up through the light blue shards of the sky to a luminous white plane above. Picasso had been developing this bold, angular form of pictorial construction throughout the war years. His still lifes, and to a certain extent, his portraits, of this period are all portrayed with the same tight sense of stasis, as objects are locked in upon the surface of the canvas.
This was not the first time that Picasso had turned to the city as a subject for his work during the War. In 1943, he painted a series of paintings that depicted the Vert-Galant, a small park situated at the western tip of the Ile de la Cité. When asked by André Malraux why he turned to the landscape at this time—a relatively rare genre in the artist’s oeuvre—Picasso explained that because he was unable to travel, he instead took frequent walks around the city. “One day all these things registered in me, unbeknownst to me,” he recalled, “they began to come out” (quoted in M.C. Cone, Artists under Vichy: A Case of Prejudice and Persecution, Princeton, 1992, p. 139). As Picasso’s statement demonstrates, he did not paint his wartime cityscapes en plein air. Rather than being topographically accurate they are instead remembered images of his surroundings, composites of time and place that the artist reconstructed upon his canvas.
While Notre-Dame was undoubtedly a conveniently located motif for the artist, its symbolism as a beacon of French culture, humanity and religion had a powerful resonance at this time. In choosing to paint this landmark, Picasso was capturing the beauty of his adopted home as it emerged triumphant from the War, immortalizing in paint the endurance of the human spirit.