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Lot Essay
The present work is Picasso’s 1901 proposal for the cover of the second publication of Arte Joven, the short-lived modernist literary-cum-art magazine set up as a collaboration between the artist and his close friend, editor and anarchist Francisco de Asís Soler. The ‘young art’ journal aimed to promote avant-garde ideas to an intellectual audience and took a critically unflinching look at Spanish society, acknowledging its underbelly, its outcasts and misfits, and this recto-verso sketch offers a fascinating insight into his radical social and political outlook of the time.
The then just nineteen-year-old Picasso had recently moved back to Madrid after having studied there a few years prior. His illustrations and cartoons for Arte Joven were cynically satirical in tone and bear the influence of El Greco’s more melancholic figures along with some of the rawness of Toulouse-Lautrec. Sketched in the same vein, this cover represents a milestone in the artist’s life as it was made immediately prior to his move to Paris and presages his ‘Blue Period’.
The starkly graphical image shows a grim-faced woman, encased by a voluminous coat, sat with a glass in front of her. The artist autographs his work with the nascent script and signature ‘dibujos de P. R. Picasso’. The verso, is more confidently appended with the now more familiar signature ‘Picasso’. The sketch prefigures his Buveur d'Absinthe from the same year. Now held by the Hermitage, the painting features the same stony-faced expression and hair bun as on the book cover, both standing as a testimony to the artist’s capacity for caricatural social realism.
The then just nineteen-year-old Picasso had recently moved back to Madrid after having studied there a few years prior. His illustrations and cartoons for Arte Joven were cynically satirical in tone and bear the influence of El Greco’s more melancholic figures along with some of the rawness of Toulouse-Lautrec. Sketched in the same vein, this cover represents a milestone in the artist’s life as it was made immediately prior to his move to Paris and presages his ‘Blue Period’.
The starkly graphical image shows a grim-faced woman, encased by a voluminous coat, sat with a glass in front of her. The artist autographs his work with the nascent script and signature ‘dibujos de P. R. Picasso’. The verso, is more confidently appended with the now more familiar signature ‘Picasso’. The sketch prefigures his Buveur d'Absinthe from the same year. Now held by the Hermitage, the painting features the same stony-faced expression and hair bun as on the book cover, both standing as a testimony to the artist’s capacity for caricatural social realism.