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Lot Essay
In May 1901 Picasso left Barcelona for his second stay in Paris. Carlos Casagemas, his companion from his first trip to Paris the year before and his closest friend, had killed himself in a Paris café in February over a frustrated love affair. Picasso had been in Madrid at the time, and had not even attended the memorial service for his friend that was held in Barcelona. But memories of Casagemas weighed heavily on Picasso, and the sadness and disappointment surrounding his friend's existence would soon help propel Picasso into his Blue period. Upon arriving in Paris, Picasso headed for the apartment at 130ter boulevard de Clichy where Casagemas had passed the final nights of his life. He arranged to stay in his dead friend's rooms, and shared them with another friend from Barcelona, Pere Mañach, who paid the rent and was acting as Picasso's dealer and agent. Then to the great dismay of his friends, Picasso left Odette, his girlfriend from his first Paris trip, and took up with Germaine, the young woman over whom Casagemas had shot himself.
Picasso was then only nineteen, and like Casagemas and other lesser-known artists, might have succumbed to Bohemian pathos and misery, but more than anything else he was ambitious and especially eager to prove himself during his second foray into the Parisian art world. Mañach had arranged an amazing opportunity for the young painter: a show of Picasso's work was scheduled to open at Ambroise Vollard's small gallery on rue Lafitte in June 24. Vollard was a friend of Degas and Pissarro, and had an incomparable inventory of paintings by Cézanne and Gauguin. He attracted a progressive clientele from all over Europe and America.
Picasso had plenty of work to do, for he had brought only about twenty paintings and some drawings with him from Spain. Mañach encouraged his protégé to leave the paintings of prostitutes and other low-life subjects that he was accustomed to doing and try his hand at more salable genres, such as views of Paris, racetracks, scenes with children, and still-lifes. The critic and chronicler Gustave Coquiot, whom Mañach had enlisted to write the preface to the catalogue, claimed that Picasso painted as many as ten pictures a day, but a more sensible number would be two or three. It was nevertheless a prodigious feat for such a young painter. The exhibition included sixty-four numbered entries of paintings, pastels, watercolors, and a large group of drawings. Vollard, who had developed a fondness for the work of Spanish artists, was at the same time showing work by the Basque painter Francisco Iturrino. Picasso was friendly with Iturrino, and certainly did not begrudge him a share of the space; one of Picasso's paintings on view was a portrait of him. The walls of the gallery were filled with pictures hung from floor to ceiling.
Both Pierre Daix and Josep Palau i Fabre have done considerable work in identifying the paintings that are listed by title only in the Vollard catalogue. In some cases we know which collectors owned the paintings, because Mañach managed to sell some of the pictures before the exhibition opened, and a few owner's names were listed in the catalogue, in the hope this would encourage others to buy as well. Daix's and Palau's findings coincide in many more instances than not, but one entry on which they disagree is the painting that pertains to the one titled Les courses, no. 32 in the Vollard exhibition catalogue.
There are four paintings which Picasso painted during this time which fit this title. Two of the paintings show the crowd of onlookers divided by the track into a group seen close-up in the foreground and another larger group in the distance, with a row of trees behind them. Two others show elegantly dressed women milling in the enclosure; the track and trees are seen behind them. Palau's choice for exhibition entry no. 32 is a picture from the former pair, which he titled A Race Meeting (fig. 1; Palau i Fabre 588; Daix V.33). Palau favors this one because it is the only one which shows the winning post and steward's box, with a race in progress. A contemporary review of the exhibition by Félicien Fagus (a nom de plume for critic Georges Faillet) mentions the painting depicted "the multicolored swarming of crowds at the race track" (quoted in Daix, op. cit., p. 155), which seems to fit Palau's candidate.
Daix, on the other hand, favors a picture from the latter pair, the present painting, which he titles At the Races (Palau i Fabre 587; Daix V.31). A good deal of circumstantial evidence favors this choice. The board on which it is painted originally contained on the reverse a study for the celebrated self-portrait Yo Picasso (fig. 2; Palau i Fabre 570; Daix V.2), which is no. 1 in the Vollard exhibition catalogue. This board was recently split with the approval of Maya Widmaier-Picasso (Christie's, London, 26 June 2001, lot 17). Daix believes that both the present work and the study for Yo Picasso were done shortly before the Vollard exhibition. It would seem likely that the painting of the racetrack on the reverse of the study would also have been painted in advance of the Vollard show opening.
The first owner of this double-sided painting, was Emmanuel Virenque, the Spanish consul in Paris. He had acquired the painting Au Moulin Rouge (fig. 3) from Picasso and Mañach before the Vollard show, and is credited as its owner under no. 11 in the catalogue. When Virenque's friends saw the painting on view they were shocked at its subject - a disolute-looking prostitute appearing to one side, with girls' legs raised in a can-can in the background - and persuaded him to exchange it for another painting by Picasso. Virenque chose the present painting, which he would have probably picked out from the many works on view in Vollard's gallery. Palau's choice, however, was not sold until sometime later. It appears to have been in a group show at Galerie Berthe Weill in June 1902, and apparently not having been sold then, was included in a second group show at the same gallery in November. While some of the paintings in the Vollard exhibition went unsold, John Richardson notes that these went to Mañach for his stock or back to the artist, "Two seascapes and a portrait of Germaine were among the few unsold works that he failed to paint over" (J. Richardson, op. cit., p. 200).
Another possibility is that the two paintings selected by Daix and Palau were both on view, but at different times, as Vollard and Mañach hustled to sell the pictures in the exhibition. The title Les courses would have provided a usefully nonspecific description that would have served for any of the handful of racing pictures that Picasso had ready for the exhibition.
The exhibition was a great success. "The Vollard exhibit was a stunning bravura performance for a neophyte, and it included some brilliant tours de force. Mañach's insistence on salability paid off: the show was not only a succès d'estime; it was, in a modest way, a financial success. Well over half the items sold" (ibid., p. 199). This success was in large part due to the efforts of Mañach as publicist. He managed to get some well-placed, timely and flattering reviews from Coquiot, whose catalogue preface was reprinted in the newspaper Le Journal, Pere Coll, who wrote in the magazine La Veu de Catalunya, and the above-mentioned Fagus, who contributed to the highly regarded periodical La Revue Blanche. Fagus wrote of Picasso as a brilliant newcomer, arriving in Paris at the head of new invasion of Spanish talent that sprung from the tradition of Goya:
...he [Picasso] has the power of divining the essence of things. Like all pure painters he adores the use of color for its own sake. He is enamoured of all subjects, and every subject is his. Besides the great ancestral masters, many likely influences can be distinguished - Delacroix, Manet (everything points to him, whose painting is a little Spanish), Monet, Van Gogh, Pissarro, Toulouse-Lautrec, Degas, Forain, Rops. Picasso's passionate surge forward has not yet left him the leisure to forge a personal style; personality is embodied in this hastiness, this youthful impetuous spontaneity. The danger lies in this very impetuousity, which could easily lead to facile virtuosity and easy success. That would be profoundly regrettable since we are in the presence of such brilliant virility. (F. Fagus quoted in ibid., p. 199)
Mañach saw to it that each of the three critics received a painting out of the exhibition in gratitude.
The paintings done in Paris in the late spring and summer of 1901 show Picasso acquiring fluency in the divisionist technique that characterized the work of many of the progressive post-Impressionist painters working in France at the turn of the century. Picasso was indeed painting in a new way. The paintings he had done in Madrid the previous winter were more carefully drawn, and the color is often restrained and somber in a manner derived from Symbolist painting that many Spanish artists shared. Picasso began to experiment with divisionism in some of the paintings he did in Barcelona in the spring, and when he arrived in Paris he applied his colors in broad and broken brushstrokes. Forms were no longer outlined and contours were defined entirely by means of contrasting color. Picasso's friend Jaime Sabartès (later the artist's longtime secretary) arrived on his first trip to Paris in October and was stunned by the change in these recent paintings. "The pictures Picasso showed me had violent tonalities and the colors at first sight reminded me of the shades of playing cards" (quoted in P. Daix, op. cit., p. 154).
We do not know if Picasso actually attended the Grand Semaine, which was formerly the week long period preceding the Grand Prix and was now a two week event in early June, beginning with the derby at Chantilly, and included steeplechases and hurdles at Auteuil and Longchamp. Pere Coll wrote in his June 3 chronicle for La Vue de Catalunya, "These days are the most animated and elegant, the ones preferred by the beau monde for launching the summer fashions and for celebrating the victories of the horses that have run at the three most elegant racecourses in the world" (quoted in J. Palau i Fabre, op. cit., p. 233). Besides being very busy with preparations for the exhibition at Vollard's gallery, Picasso lacked the means to mix with this well-heeled crowd, except as a distant onlooker. The fashionable ladies in the present painting are perhaps a continuation of the extravagantly costumed courtesans that Picasso had painted in Madrid, which, as Richardson has noted, he "drew partly from fantasy, partly on the vision of other artists (e.g. Lautrec, Steinlen and Bottini)" (J. Richardson, op. cit., p. 182). Picasso might have followed the reportage of writers like Coll, who on June 13th observed that "light colours, openwork muslin, chiffon ensembles and touches of canary yellow are to be the height of fashion this season" (J. Palau i Fabre, op. cit., p. 234). The outlandish dresses and hats worn by these women are like the plumage of grand exotic birds. Someone like the respectable consul Virenque could look upon them as being perfectly respectable ladies of his own class (so unlike the prostitute in Au Moulin Rouge), but Picasso probably painted these creatures as prosperous courtesans parading in their finery. There is an element of fantasy here, as there had been in the Madrid pictures; the virtuosic flourishes in his brushwork, the hallmark of his new style, heightens the effect to an almost feverish degree.
Picasso never again painted the races. Other contemporaries such as van Dongen and Dufy repeatedly treated this theme in their mature work, knowing that such fashionable subjects would always be a success with buyers. By the fall of 1901, when the initial flush of the great success at Vollard's had begun to wear off, Picasso was again turning to darker subjects - the death of Casagemas and the poor inmates of the women's prison of Saint-Lazare; and his style changed as well, into the monochrome figures with the heavy black outlines of the Blue period. Picasso remembered many years later how the Vollard exhibition "went very well. It pleased a lot of people. It was only later when I set about to do blue paintings that things went really badly. This lasted for years" (quoted in P. Daix, op. cit., p. 154).
(fig. 1) Pablo Picasso, A Race Meeting, 1901.
© 2002 Estate of Pablo Picasso Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York.
(fig. 2) Pablo Picasso, Etude pour 'Yo Picasso', 1901.
(Christie's, London, 26 June 2001, lot 17)
© 2002 Estate of Pablo Picasso Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York.
(fig. 3) Pablo Picasso, Au Moulin Rouge, 1901.
Location unknown.
© 2002 Estate of Pablo Picasso Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York.
Picasso was then only nineteen, and like Casagemas and other lesser-known artists, might have succumbed to Bohemian pathos and misery, but more than anything else he was ambitious and especially eager to prove himself during his second foray into the Parisian art world. Mañach had arranged an amazing opportunity for the young painter: a show of Picasso's work was scheduled to open at Ambroise Vollard's small gallery on rue Lafitte in June 24. Vollard was a friend of Degas and Pissarro, and had an incomparable inventory of paintings by Cézanne and Gauguin. He attracted a progressive clientele from all over Europe and America.
Picasso had plenty of work to do, for he had brought only about twenty paintings and some drawings with him from Spain. Mañach encouraged his protégé to leave the paintings of prostitutes and other low-life subjects that he was accustomed to doing and try his hand at more salable genres, such as views of Paris, racetracks, scenes with children, and still-lifes. The critic and chronicler Gustave Coquiot, whom Mañach had enlisted to write the preface to the catalogue, claimed that Picasso painted as many as ten pictures a day, but a more sensible number would be two or three. It was nevertheless a prodigious feat for such a young painter. The exhibition included sixty-four numbered entries of paintings, pastels, watercolors, and a large group of drawings. Vollard, who had developed a fondness for the work of Spanish artists, was at the same time showing work by the Basque painter Francisco Iturrino. Picasso was friendly with Iturrino, and certainly did not begrudge him a share of the space; one of Picasso's paintings on view was a portrait of him. The walls of the gallery were filled with pictures hung from floor to ceiling.
Both Pierre Daix and Josep Palau i Fabre have done considerable work in identifying the paintings that are listed by title only in the Vollard catalogue. In some cases we know which collectors owned the paintings, because Mañach managed to sell some of the pictures before the exhibition opened, and a few owner's names were listed in the catalogue, in the hope this would encourage others to buy as well. Daix's and Palau's findings coincide in many more instances than not, but one entry on which they disagree is the painting that pertains to the one titled Les courses, no. 32 in the Vollard exhibition catalogue.
There are four paintings which Picasso painted during this time which fit this title. Two of the paintings show the crowd of onlookers divided by the track into a group seen close-up in the foreground and another larger group in the distance, with a row of trees behind them. Two others show elegantly dressed women milling in the enclosure; the track and trees are seen behind them. Palau's choice for exhibition entry no. 32 is a picture from the former pair, which he titled A Race Meeting (fig. 1; Palau i Fabre 588; Daix V.33). Palau favors this one because it is the only one which shows the winning post and steward's box, with a race in progress. A contemporary review of the exhibition by Félicien Fagus (a nom de plume for critic Georges Faillet) mentions the painting depicted "the multicolored swarming of crowds at the race track" (quoted in Daix, op. cit., p. 155), which seems to fit Palau's candidate.
Daix, on the other hand, favors a picture from the latter pair, the present painting, which he titles At the Races (Palau i Fabre 587; Daix V.31). A good deal of circumstantial evidence favors this choice. The board on which it is painted originally contained on the reverse a study for the celebrated self-portrait Yo Picasso (fig. 2; Palau i Fabre 570; Daix V.2), which is no. 1 in the Vollard exhibition catalogue. This board was recently split with the approval of Maya Widmaier-Picasso (Christie's, London, 26 June 2001, lot 17). Daix believes that both the present work and the study for Yo Picasso were done shortly before the Vollard exhibition. It would seem likely that the painting of the racetrack on the reverse of the study would also have been painted in advance of the Vollard show opening.
The first owner of this double-sided painting, was Emmanuel Virenque, the Spanish consul in Paris. He had acquired the painting Au Moulin Rouge (fig. 3) from Picasso and Mañach before the Vollard show, and is credited as its owner under no. 11 in the catalogue. When Virenque's friends saw the painting on view they were shocked at its subject - a disolute-looking prostitute appearing to one side, with girls' legs raised in a can-can in the background - and persuaded him to exchange it for another painting by Picasso. Virenque chose the present painting, which he would have probably picked out from the many works on view in Vollard's gallery. Palau's choice, however, was not sold until sometime later. It appears to have been in a group show at Galerie Berthe Weill in June 1902, and apparently not having been sold then, was included in a second group show at the same gallery in November. While some of the paintings in the Vollard exhibition went unsold, John Richardson notes that these went to Mañach for his stock or back to the artist, "Two seascapes and a portrait of Germaine were among the few unsold works that he failed to paint over" (J. Richardson, op. cit., p. 200).
Another possibility is that the two paintings selected by Daix and Palau were both on view, but at different times, as Vollard and Mañach hustled to sell the pictures in the exhibition. The title Les courses would have provided a usefully nonspecific description that would have served for any of the handful of racing pictures that Picasso had ready for the exhibition.
The exhibition was a great success. "The Vollard exhibit was a stunning bravura performance for a neophyte, and it included some brilliant tours de force. Mañach's insistence on salability paid off: the show was not only a succès d'estime; it was, in a modest way, a financial success. Well over half the items sold" (ibid., p. 199). This success was in large part due to the efforts of Mañach as publicist. He managed to get some well-placed, timely and flattering reviews from Coquiot, whose catalogue preface was reprinted in the newspaper Le Journal, Pere Coll, who wrote in the magazine La Veu de Catalunya, and the above-mentioned Fagus, who contributed to the highly regarded periodical La Revue Blanche. Fagus wrote of Picasso as a brilliant newcomer, arriving in Paris at the head of new invasion of Spanish talent that sprung from the tradition of Goya:
...he [Picasso] has the power of divining the essence of things. Like all pure painters he adores the use of color for its own sake. He is enamoured of all subjects, and every subject is his. Besides the great ancestral masters, many likely influences can be distinguished - Delacroix, Manet (everything points to him, whose painting is a little Spanish), Monet, Van Gogh, Pissarro, Toulouse-Lautrec, Degas, Forain, Rops. Picasso's passionate surge forward has not yet left him the leisure to forge a personal style; personality is embodied in this hastiness, this youthful impetuous spontaneity. The danger lies in this very impetuousity, which could easily lead to facile virtuosity and easy success. That would be profoundly regrettable since we are in the presence of such brilliant virility. (F. Fagus quoted in ibid., p. 199)
Mañach saw to it that each of the three critics received a painting out of the exhibition in gratitude.
The paintings done in Paris in the late spring and summer of 1901 show Picasso acquiring fluency in the divisionist technique that characterized the work of many of the progressive post-Impressionist painters working in France at the turn of the century. Picasso was indeed painting in a new way. The paintings he had done in Madrid the previous winter were more carefully drawn, and the color is often restrained and somber in a manner derived from Symbolist painting that many Spanish artists shared. Picasso began to experiment with divisionism in some of the paintings he did in Barcelona in the spring, and when he arrived in Paris he applied his colors in broad and broken brushstrokes. Forms were no longer outlined and contours were defined entirely by means of contrasting color. Picasso's friend Jaime Sabartès (later the artist's longtime secretary) arrived on his first trip to Paris in October and was stunned by the change in these recent paintings. "The pictures Picasso showed me had violent tonalities and the colors at first sight reminded me of the shades of playing cards" (quoted in P. Daix, op. cit., p. 154).
We do not know if Picasso actually attended the Grand Semaine, which was formerly the week long period preceding the Grand Prix and was now a two week event in early June, beginning with the derby at Chantilly, and included steeplechases and hurdles at Auteuil and Longchamp. Pere Coll wrote in his June 3 chronicle for La Vue de Catalunya, "These days are the most animated and elegant, the ones preferred by the beau monde for launching the summer fashions and for celebrating the victories of the horses that have run at the three most elegant racecourses in the world" (quoted in J. Palau i Fabre, op. cit., p. 233). Besides being very busy with preparations for the exhibition at Vollard's gallery, Picasso lacked the means to mix with this well-heeled crowd, except as a distant onlooker. The fashionable ladies in the present painting are perhaps a continuation of the extravagantly costumed courtesans that Picasso had painted in Madrid, which, as Richardson has noted, he "drew partly from fantasy, partly on the vision of other artists (e.g. Lautrec, Steinlen and Bottini)" (J. Richardson, op. cit., p. 182). Picasso might have followed the reportage of writers like Coll, who on June 13th observed that "light colours, openwork muslin, chiffon ensembles and touches of canary yellow are to be the height of fashion this season" (J. Palau i Fabre, op. cit., p. 234). The outlandish dresses and hats worn by these women are like the plumage of grand exotic birds. Someone like the respectable consul Virenque could look upon them as being perfectly respectable ladies of his own class (so unlike the prostitute in Au Moulin Rouge), but Picasso probably painted these creatures as prosperous courtesans parading in their finery. There is an element of fantasy here, as there had been in the Madrid pictures; the virtuosic flourishes in his brushwork, the hallmark of his new style, heightens the effect to an almost feverish degree.
Picasso never again painted the races. Other contemporaries such as van Dongen and Dufy repeatedly treated this theme in their mature work, knowing that such fashionable subjects would always be a success with buyers. By the fall of 1901, when the initial flush of the great success at Vollard's had begun to wear off, Picasso was again turning to darker subjects - the death of Casagemas and the poor inmates of the women's prison of Saint-Lazare; and his style changed as well, into the monochrome figures with the heavy black outlines of the Blue period. Picasso remembered many years later how the Vollard exhibition "went very well. It pleased a lot of people. It was only later when I set about to do blue paintings that things went really badly. This lasted for years" (quoted in P. Daix, op. cit., p. 154).
(fig. 1) Pablo Picasso, A Race Meeting, 1901.
© 2002 Estate of Pablo Picasso Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York.
(fig. 2) Pablo Picasso, Etude pour 'Yo Picasso', 1901.
(Christie's, London, 26 June 2001, lot 17)
© 2002 Estate of Pablo Picasso Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York.
(fig. 3) Pablo Picasso, Au Moulin Rouge, 1901.
Location unknown.
© 2002 Estate of Pablo Picasso Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York.