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Lot Essay
In April of 1954 Pablo Picasso painted a series of portraits of Sylvette David, the twenty-four year old blond beauty whom he had met in a street in Vallauris. She became the subject of forty drawings and twelve paintings that Picasso executed in a period of less than two months, almost all of which are painted in grey monochrome tones and show her in full to three-quarter profile. Within these self-imposed limitations in tonality and format, Picasso recorded his model's features and expression in a diverse and changing manner. The present painting shows Picasso distilling her features to their simplest forms, emphasizing her slender and graceful neck and the angularity of her pony-tail in a sphinx-like pose.
The presence of a new female subject usually signified a major change in the artist's emotional life. Sylvette's presence helped to assuage Picasso's unhappiness at the end of his relationship with Françoise Gilot, who had left him that fall, and occupied the artist's attention until the arrival of Jacqueline Roque, the muse of Picasso's late years. Pierre Daix writes about the enthusiasm Sylvette generated in Picasso's work: "Picasso is always ahead with his work, the challenge of Sylvette was that she was one of those new type of women, not only a sensual esthetique: those of the generation after Françoise, still children during the war. Here the occasion to return to the portraits of Françoise has passed...It is not an exercise of virtuosity. If Sylvette transforms him, it is because she has shared her secret with him, the secret of youth. Afterall, he had failed with Françoise who, contrary to Marie-Thérèse and to Dora, had escaped from his power. Sylvette seated in a chair or not, in profile, in three-quarters, with rectilinear geometry and vigorous drawing or, to the opposite point, with all the grace of her natural curves, the more or less slender neck, stubborn, withdrawn, ironic, distant" (P. Daix, La vie de Peintre de Pablo Picasso, Paris, 1977, p. 355).
According to Klaus Gallwitz: "The portraits concentrate so single-mindedly on the youthful head that the individual features become subsidiary to the type into which Picasso condensed them. What makes the Sylvette portraits remarkable is that through Picasso's paintings this young girl came to typify a whole generation" (K. Gallwitz, Picasso at 90, the Late Work, London, 1971, p. 70).
The presence of a new female subject usually signified a major change in the artist's emotional life. Sylvette's presence helped to assuage Picasso's unhappiness at the end of his relationship with Françoise Gilot, who had left him that fall, and occupied the artist's attention until the arrival of Jacqueline Roque, the muse of Picasso's late years. Pierre Daix writes about the enthusiasm Sylvette generated in Picasso's work: "Picasso is always ahead with his work, the challenge of Sylvette was that she was one of those new type of women, not only a sensual esthetique: those of the generation after Françoise, still children during the war. Here the occasion to return to the portraits of Françoise has passed...It is not an exercise of virtuosity. If Sylvette transforms him, it is because she has shared her secret with him, the secret of youth. Afterall, he had failed with Françoise who, contrary to Marie-Thérèse and to Dora, had escaped from his power. Sylvette seated in a chair or not, in profile, in three-quarters, with rectilinear geometry and vigorous drawing or, to the opposite point, with all the grace of her natural curves, the more or less slender neck, stubborn, withdrawn, ironic, distant" (P. Daix, La vie de Peintre de Pablo Picasso, Paris, 1977, p. 355).
According to Klaus Gallwitz: "The portraits concentrate so single-mindedly on the youthful head that the individual features become subsidiary to the type into which Picasso condensed them. What makes the Sylvette portraits remarkable is that through Picasso's paintings this young girl came to typify a whole generation" (K. Gallwitz, Picasso at 90, the Late Work, London, 1971, p. 70).