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Lot Essay
Figure of 1929 belongs to a series of powerful depictions of the human figure that Pablo Picasso painted over the course of the year. This was a time of intense inspiration in both the artist’s personal and public life. He was enraptured by his new muse and lover, Marie-Thérèse Walter, whom he had met two years prior, causing his marriage to Olga to slowly unravel and descend into bitter resentment. Picasso was closely aware and keenly stimulated by the radical developments of the Surrealists, while also engaged in an intense sculptural collaboration with Julio González, with whom he created some of the most important works of his career in this medium. All of these varying elements fed Picasso’s creativity, allowing him to forge a new pictorial idiom for the depiction of the human form, as Figure powerfully demonstrates.
As Picasso’s marriage deteriorated in the late 1920s, so Olga’s presence incited a series of distorted and disquieting figures in his art. As John Richardson has described, these ‘exorcisms of Olga,’ were interspersed with the increasingly abstracted depictions of bathers that Picasso painted during his summertime sojourns – first in Cannes in 1927, followed by Dinard in 1928 and 1929 (A Life of Picasso, The Triumphant Years, 1917-1932, London, 2009, vol. 3, p. 373). There, inspired by the statuesque form and youthful presence of Marie-Thérèse, he painted a series of surreal, biomorphic figures, whose proportions are enlarged and exaggerated.
Together, these works, including Figure, have been termed by Christian Zervos as tableaux magiques. Fusing influences both internal and external, Picasso worked like a magician to conjure a new, radical and expressive mode of representing the human form, one that took the groundbreaking pictorial construction of Cubism and invested it with a novel emotional power that was at times captivating, disturbing, threatening or moving. Seen together, works such as Figure are regarded as among the most revolutionary depictions of the figure since the artist’s cubist years.
Throughout 1929, the human figure had taken on increasingly terrifying appearance in Picasso’s art. As Figure demonstrates, in many of these works Picasso reduced the head to an abstract construction of pictorial signs as he relentlessly pushed the boundaries of representation. Eyes are rendered as small circles, heads as flattened, geometric forms that intersect and interlock to create the figure’s visage and body. In other works, Picasso rendered the body as if carved from stone, monumental and sculptural. While depersonalised, these heads and busts are nevertheless filled with an emotive power, often appearing monstrous, with open mouths and pointed teeth, as in the present work, or sexualised, with genitalia disguised as facial features. ‘Nothing remained unviolated,’ Roland Penrose wrote of these works, ‘but the power of this sign language lies in the discovery that the association these vestiges of resemblance to our own features hold for us is undeniable, and it gives a new and strange fascination to find that we can reconstruct our own image from such complete and improbable distortions’ (Picasso: His Life and Work, London, 1958, p. 233).
The restrained, linear construction and grisaille palette of Figure also has clear equivalences with the artist’s concurrent work in three dimensions. In 1928, the year before he painted the present work, Picasso began working with González. The Spanish born sculptor had known Picasso since their early days in Paris in the 1900s. Having grown up in a family of metalsmiths, González had an innate understanding of the art of shaping and joining metal, and, thanks to these skills in metalwork, he was able to construct his works from start to finish, without sending them to a foundry to cast. This technique was rare at this time – sculpting directly in metal was almost impossible for artists without direct experience of these methods. As a result, Picasso’s works from this time are constructed, multipartite sculptures made from welded metal. Works such as Tête of 1928 (Spies, no. 66) and La femme au jardin of 1929 (Spies, no. 72) have clear correspondences to Picasso’s painting of this period. Indeed, the constructed composition of Tête in particular finds a close representation in painterly form in the present Figure.
Figure was painted at a time when Picasso was keenly aware of the concurrent developments of the Surrealists. Far from a mimetic, representational depiction of the human figure, his paintings from this period, with their often disquieting emotive power, can be regarded as having a distinctly surrealist element to them. With an interest – and rivalry – with his avant-garde contemporaries, Picasso was extremely cognisant of the rise of this new artistic group in the mid-1920s. André Breton, the self-styled leader, courted Picasso, repeatedly attempting to convince him to sign up and publicly pledge allegiance to his nascent group. While Picasso was sympathetic to the Surrealists’ overt embrace of the irrational and the subconscious, chance and surprise, and admired their disregard for conventional standards, he had no desire to sign away his independence to the Surrealist program. He recognised that his talent, and indeed his success, lay in his expectation-defying ability to artistically shapeshift. His autonomy had long set him apart from the various factions and groups that had come to define the early years of the twentieth century.
While ensuring that his identity was separate from the Surrealists, Picasso’s work of the 1920s reflected their shared concerns. Though the Surrealists’ automatic techniques did not interest Picasso, he did experiment with some of the other processes and practices that they employed, such as metamorphosing, distorting and eroticizing the human form, into his own work throughout the late 1920s and early 1930s. As Pierre Daix aptly summarized, ‘what Picasso drew from Surrealist ideas was the liberty they gave to painting to express its own impulses, its capacity to transmute reality’ (quoted in J. Richardson, A Life of Picasso, The Minotaur Years, 1933-1943, New York, 2021, vol. IV, p. 24).
As Picasso’s marriage deteriorated in the late 1920s, so Olga’s presence incited a series of distorted and disquieting figures in his art. As John Richardson has described, these ‘exorcisms of Olga,’ were interspersed with the increasingly abstracted depictions of bathers that Picasso painted during his summertime sojourns – first in Cannes in 1927, followed by Dinard in 1928 and 1929 (A Life of Picasso, The Triumphant Years, 1917-1932, London, 2009, vol. 3, p. 373). There, inspired by the statuesque form and youthful presence of Marie-Thérèse, he painted a series of surreal, biomorphic figures, whose proportions are enlarged and exaggerated.
Together, these works, including Figure, have been termed by Christian Zervos as tableaux magiques. Fusing influences both internal and external, Picasso worked like a magician to conjure a new, radical and expressive mode of representing the human form, one that took the groundbreaking pictorial construction of Cubism and invested it with a novel emotional power that was at times captivating, disturbing, threatening or moving. Seen together, works such as Figure are regarded as among the most revolutionary depictions of the figure since the artist’s cubist years.
Throughout 1929, the human figure had taken on increasingly terrifying appearance in Picasso’s art. As Figure demonstrates, in many of these works Picasso reduced the head to an abstract construction of pictorial signs as he relentlessly pushed the boundaries of representation. Eyes are rendered as small circles, heads as flattened, geometric forms that intersect and interlock to create the figure’s visage and body. In other works, Picasso rendered the body as if carved from stone, monumental and sculptural. While depersonalised, these heads and busts are nevertheless filled with an emotive power, often appearing monstrous, with open mouths and pointed teeth, as in the present work, or sexualised, with genitalia disguised as facial features. ‘Nothing remained unviolated,’ Roland Penrose wrote of these works, ‘but the power of this sign language lies in the discovery that the association these vestiges of resemblance to our own features hold for us is undeniable, and it gives a new and strange fascination to find that we can reconstruct our own image from such complete and improbable distortions’ (Picasso: His Life and Work, London, 1958, p. 233).
The restrained, linear construction and grisaille palette of Figure also has clear equivalences with the artist’s concurrent work in three dimensions. In 1928, the year before he painted the present work, Picasso began working with González. The Spanish born sculptor had known Picasso since their early days in Paris in the 1900s. Having grown up in a family of metalsmiths, González had an innate understanding of the art of shaping and joining metal, and, thanks to these skills in metalwork, he was able to construct his works from start to finish, without sending them to a foundry to cast. This technique was rare at this time – sculpting directly in metal was almost impossible for artists without direct experience of these methods. As a result, Picasso’s works from this time are constructed, multipartite sculptures made from welded metal. Works such as Tête of 1928 (Spies, no. 66) and La femme au jardin of 1929 (Spies, no. 72) have clear correspondences to Picasso’s painting of this period. Indeed, the constructed composition of Tête in particular finds a close representation in painterly form in the present Figure.
Figure was painted at a time when Picasso was keenly aware of the concurrent developments of the Surrealists. Far from a mimetic, representational depiction of the human figure, his paintings from this period, with their often disquieting emotive power, can be regarded as having a distinctly surrealist element to them. With an interest – and rivalry – with his avant-garde contemporaries, Picasso was extremely cognisant of the rise of this new artistic group in the mid-1920s. André Breton, the self-styled leader, courted Picasso, repeatedly attempting to convince him to sign up and publicly pledge allegiance to his nascent group. While Picasso was sympathetic to the Surrealists’ overt embrace of the irrational and the subconscious, chance and surprise, and admired their disregard for conventional standards, he had no desire to sign away his independence to the Surrealist program. He recognised that his talent, and indeed his success, lay in his expectation-defying ability to artistically shapeshift. His autonomy had long set him apart from the various factions and groups that had come to define the early years of the twentieth century.
While ensuring that his identity was separate from the Surrealists, Picasso’s work of the 1920s reflected their shared concerns. Though the Surrealists’ automatic techniques did not interest Picasso, he did experiment with some of the other processes and practices that they employed, such as metamorphosing, distorting and eroticizing the human form, into his own work throughout the late 1920s and early 1930s. As Pierre Daix aptly summarized, ‘what Picasso drew from Surrealist ideas was the liberty they gave to painting to express its own impulses, its capacity to transmute reality’ (quoted in J. Richardson, A Life of Picasso, The Minotaur Years, 1933-1943, New York, 2021, vol. IV, p. 24).