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Lot Essay
This exceptional bronze, cast in 1968 in an edition of ten, is based on a ceramic first conceived in 1906 - this year stands as a pivotal moment in the progression of the modern art movement when Picasso, inspired by Iberian and pre-Roman ‘primitivist’ art, began to create his proto-Cubist pieces. The present work is emblematic of a decisive turning point in the artist’s long career and unquestionably paved the way towards his landmark painting of the following year, Les Demoiselles d'Avignon (1907).
The subject is modelled on Fernande Olivier, the muse who became Picasso’s first serious lover, and the sculpture is remarkable not only for the sense of movement it conveys but for the tenderness it demonstrates towards her.
In the summer of 1906, the twenty-four-year-old pair took a break from Paris and made the difficult journey to Gósol, a village in the northwestern region of the Catalonian Pyrenees, not that far from the artist’s family home in Barcelona. Suffering from a creative block, Picasso found the stimulus he sought in the Romanesque wall art and medieval sculpture he encountered there and in the much earlier monumental Iberian stone sculpture antiquities such as The Lady of Elche and the Cerro de los Santos; pieces that he saw in the Louvre in the same year. Following the trip, he felt at last inspired and determined to assimilate some of the schematic styling, the archaisms and the ‘magical’ power that he so admired in these artefacts into his own artistic production.
After his return to Paris, Picasso made the ceramic of Femme se coiffant in the autumn at the studio of his fellow countryman Francisco ‘Paco’ Durrio, a skilled sculptor, ceramicist and jeweller. There he could not only admire the other’s finished works but also observe his techniques and practical processes. Another significant influence was awaiting him there, too. Paul Gauguin, a close friend of Durrio, had recently left a number of sculptures with him for safekeeping. A retrospective of Gauguin’s work at the Salon d’Automne also took place in 1906, and Picasso had been particularly struck by some of the stoneware sculptures exhibited there; John Richardson, Picasso’s friend and biographer, credits Gauguin’s Oviri as a key inspiration for Femme se coiffant.
The figure is shown sitting on her heels, with knees held together demurely and her belly protruding slightly, her seiza-like pose adjusted by her right arm reaching across her body with the fingers of her hand combing or arranging her tumblingly long hair unselfconsciously. The head is gently inclined and the distrait expression on her face is one of unseeing absorption. Picasso captures the essence of the spontaneous and endearing everyday gesture of his lover. There is a raw simplicity to the modelling with echoes of Art Nouveau also evident. Notice how delicately the fingers are spread and the sense of intimacy created in the way the ear is revealed as the hair is drawn back from it.
The figure is made to be viewed frontally or from the side, not in the round. This perspectival intention is supported by Picasso’s drawings of the same subject, the majority of which also portray the figure from the side. Executed in this way, as a relief that privileges a particular vantage point, Femme se coiffant occupies the liminal sphere between two and three-dimensional art. As Anne Umland suggests, Picasso 'forced the sculpture to perform in a way that is aligned with painting, creating a distinctively hybrid form’ (‘Beginnings,’ in: Picasso Sculpture, exh. cat., The Museum of Modern Art, New York, 2015, p. 33). Picasso drew and painted the same coiffure subject extensively, consciously bringing his avant-garde sensibility to the thematic tradition followed by, among others, Delacroix and Ingres, and the later Impressionists Renoir and Degas. Many of Picasso’s studies, including La Coiffure (Femme se coiffant) (Zervos, vol. 6, no. 751; see lot 305 in this sale) are understood to have served as experimental, preparatory works for the present sculpture.
The significance of the work has been recognised by those institutions holding other casts from the edition, including the Musée Picasso in Paris, the Ny Carlsberg Glyptotek in Copenhagen, and the Berggruen Museum in Berlin. To find the sculpture and a closely related drawing in the same private collection is even more remarkable and is testimony to the extraordinary connoisseurship and discriminating taste of Klaus Hegewisch.
The subject is modelled on Fernande Olivier, the muse who became Picasso’s first serious lover, and the sculpture is remarkable not only for the sense of movement it conveys but for the tenderness it demonstrates towards her.
In the summer of 1906, the twenty-four-year-old pair took a break from Paris and made the difficult journey to Gósol, a village in the northwestern region of the Catalonian Pyrenees, not that far from the artist’s family home in Barcelona. Suffering from a creative block, Picasso found the stimulus he sought in the Romanesque wall art and medieval sculpture he encountered there and in the much earlier monumental Iberian stone sculpture antiquities such as The Lady of Elche and the Cerro de los Santos; pieces that he saw in the Louvre in the same year. Following the trip, he felt at last inspired and determined to assimilate some of the schematic styling, the archaisms and the ‘magical’ power that he so admired in these artefacts into his own artistic production.
After his return to Paris, Picasso made the ceramic of Femme se coiffant in the autumn at the studio of his fellow countryman Francisco ‘Paco’ Durrio, a skilled sculptor, ceramicist and jeweller. There he could not only admire the other’s finished works but also observe his techniques and practical processes. Another significant influence was awaiting him there, too. Paul Gauguin, a close friend of Durrio, had recently left a number of sculptures with him for safekeeping. A retrospective of Gauguin’s work at the Salon d’Automne also took place in 1906, and Picasso had been particularly struck by some of the stoneware sculptures exhibited there; John Richardson, Picasso’s friend and biographer, credits Gauguin’s Oviri as a key inspiration for Femme se coiffant.
The figure is shown sitting on her heels, with knees held together demurely and her belly protruding slightly, her seiza-like pose adjusted by her right arm reaching across her body with the fingers of her hand combing or arranging her tumblingly long hair unselfconsciously. The head is gently inclined and the distrait expression on her face is one of unseeing absorption. Picasso captures the essence of the spontaneous and endearing everyday gesture of his lover. There is a raw simplicity to the modelling with echoes of Art Nouveau also evident. Notice how delicately the fingers are spread and the sense of intimacy created in the way the ear is revealed as the hair is drawn back from it.
The figure is made to be viewed frontally or from the side, not in the round. This perspectival intention is supported by Picasso’s drawings of the same subject, the majority of which also portray the figure from the side. Executed in this way, as a relief that privileges a particular vantage point, Femme se coiffant occupies the liminal sphere between two and three-dimensional art. As Anne Umland suggests, Picasso 'forced the sculpture to perform in a way that is aligned with painting, creating a distinctively hybrid form’ (‘Beginnings,’ in: Picasso Sculpture, exh. cat., The Museum of Modern Art, New York, 2015, p. 33). Picasso drew and painted the same coiffure subject extensively, consciously bringing his avant-garde sensibility to the thematic tradition followed by, among others, Delacroix and Ingres, and the later Impressionists Renoir and Degas. Many of Picasso’s studies, including La Coiffure (Femme se coiffant) (Zervos, vol. 6, no. 751; see lot 305 in this sale) are understood to have served as experimental, preparatory works for the present sculpture.
The significance of the work has been recognised by those institutions holding other casts from the edition, including the Musée Picasso in Paris, the Ny Carlsberg Glyptotek in Copenhagen, and the Berggruen Museum in Berlin. To find the sculpture and a closely related drawing in the same private collection is even more remarkable and is testimony to the extraordinary connoisseurship and discriminating taste of Klaus Hegewisch.