.jpg?w=1)
Lot Essay
Maya Widmaier Picasso has confirmed the authenticity of this drawing.
Picasso's first stay in Paris lasted only a couple of months, from October to December 1900. A few days before Christmas Picasso and his friend the painter Carles Casagemas returned to Barcelona. The reason for their departure was Casagemas's depressed state of mind. He had fallen in love with Germaine Pichot, one of a group of young models who associated with Spanish painters working in Paris. Germaine refused to leave her husband to live with Casagemas, a situation which was aggravated by Casagemas's drug-use and apparent impotence. After spending Christmas with their families in Barcelona, the two artists visited Picasso's birthplace in Malaga. Lovesick for Germaine, Casagemas then returned to Paris, while Picasso decided to try his luck in Madrid, where he arrived in mid-January 1901.
In Madrid Picasso connected with a Catalan friend and well-to-do dilletante, Francisco Asis de Soler, who proposed that the artist illustrate a new magazine he had in the works, Arte Joven. "Picasso threw himself into the production of the magazine. But this new responsibility bored him. And why waste time doing illustrations for an amateurish magazine when he should have been concentrating on drawing and painting for the Paris exhibition that [Père] Manach had promised him? And why stay on in Madrid: a city that he disliked, a city he found less geared to modern art than Barcelona?" (J. Richardson, A Life of Picasso, vol. 1, 1881-1906, New York, 1991, p. 178). The first issue of Arte Joven was published on March 31, 1901, and only three more issues followed.
During his recent stay in Paris, Picasso had been struck by the easygoing sexual mores of the Parisians, who were accustomed to embracing in public, so unlike the far more restrained public behavior in his native Spain. There are numerous embracing couples among Picasso's Paris pictures, and in his drawings and paintings in Madrid he returned to this theme, although the setting is generally the more discrete boudoir or drawing-room (as in the present work), or occasionally the brothel parlor. Well-dressed women, some respectably middle-class, others courtesans of doubtful repute, flirt with young dandies. "There was not much of a gilded demimonde in Madrid but even if there had been, Picasso would not have had access to it. He drew partly on fantasy, partly on the vision of other artists (e.g., Lautrec, Steinlen and Bottini) and partly on his memories of la vie parisienne (ibid., p. 182).
Picasso's first stay in Paris lasted only a couple of months, from October to December 1900. A few days before Christmas Picasso and his friend the painter Carles Casagemas returned to Barcelona. The reason for their departure was Casagemas's depressed state of mind. He had fallen in love with Germaine Pichot, one of a group of young models who associated with Spanish painters working in Paris. Germaine refused to leave her husband to live with Casagemas, a situation which was aggravated by Casagemas's drug-use and apparent impotence. After spending Christmas with their families in Barcelona, the two artists visited Picasso's birthplace in Malaga. Lovesick for Germaine, Casagemas then returned to Paris, while Picasso decided to try his luck in Madrid, where he arrived in mid-January 1901.
In Madrid Picasso connected with a Catalan friend and well-to-do dilletante, Francisco Asis de Soler, who proposed that the artist illustrate a new magazine he had in the works, Arte Joven. "Picasso threw himself into the production of the magazine. But this new responsibility bored him. And why waste time doing illustrations for an amateurish magazine when he should have been concentrating on drawing and painting for the Paris exhibition that [Père] Manach had promised him? And why stay on in Madrid: a city that he disliked, a city he found less geared to modern art than Barcelona?" (J. Richardson, A Life of Picasso, vol. 1, 1881-1906, New York, 1991, p. 178). The first issue of Arte Joven was published on March 31, 1901, and only three more issues followed.
During his recent stay in Paris, Picasso had been struck by the easygoing sexual mores of the Parisians, who were accustomed to embracing in public, so unlike the far more restrained public behavior in his native Spain. There are numerous embracing couples among Picasso's Paris pictures, and in his drawings and paintings in Madrid he returned to this theme, although the setting is generally the more discrete boudoir or drawing-room (as in the present work), or occasionally the brothel parlor. Well-dressed women, some respectably middle-class, others courtesans of doubtful repute, flirt with young dandies. "There was not much of a gilded demimonde in Madrid but even if there had been, Picasso would not have had access to it. He drew partly on fantasy, partly on the vision of other artists (e.g., Lautrec, Steinlen and Bottini) and partly on his memories of la vie parisienne (ibid., p. 182).