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拍品專文
During the summer of 1937, Picasso went with Dora Maar to spend summer on the Côte d'Azur. Among the people there were the Eluards, Man Ray and his former lover and reconciled friend, Lee Miller (fig. 1). William Rubin has suggested that L'Arlesienne is one of a small group of portraits of Lee Miller that Picasso painted during this stay (fig. 2). Indeed, he occupied himself with painting various pictures of the others with him, transforming them through the alchemy of his imagination and his brush into various characters. Where Eluard was depicted as a woman, Miller took on the persona of Van Gogh's L'Arlesienne (fig. 3), Madame Ginoux, who sat in a series of boldly coloured portraits painted in Arles and Saint-Rémy between 1888 and 1890. This acts as a tribute on Picasso's part to the formidable Lee Miller, while also creating a highly personal record of his time in the South of France. By referring directly to the Arles period in Van Gogh's life, Picasso hints that he saw this time as an artistic rebirth as he moved from his fluid Cubism to something more raw and more earthy, a process that would be reflected in his agonising portraits of Dora Maar.
The theme of Van Gogh's L'Arlesienne is borne out by Picasso's use of bold colours in the background in his L'Arlesienne. While the intense yellows of the sitter herself and her actual pose are reminiscent of what is probably the most famous of Van Gogh's portraits of Mme. Ginoux, that now in the Metropolitan Museum in New York, the pinkish background recalls some of the later Saint-Rémy paintings. Picasso has displaced the various colours, and yet the painting insists on Van Gogh pedigree, managing to condense it into something other than a direct reference.
While there are superficial similarities between the two artists' Arlesiennes, the reference on Picasso's part is conscious but not entire. Van Gogh's paintings are noted for the liveliness with which the paintwork fills them, and yet Picasso has eschewed the older master's techniques and created a work packed with vitality in a wholly different way. The paint has in parts been deliberately left to drip and has clearly been applied with energy and enthusiasm. The drip marks themselves introduce an element of chance wholly appropriate to the Surrealist company that Picasso was keeping in Mougins.
The theme of Van Gogh's L'Arlesienne is borne out by Picasso's use of bold colours in the background in his L'Arlesienne. While the intense yellows of the sitter herself and her actual pose are reminiscent of what is probably the most famous of Van Gogh's portraits of Mme. Ginoux, that now in the Metropolitan Museum in New York, the pinkish background recalls some of the later Saint-Rémy paintings. Picasso has displaced the various colours, and yet the painting insists on Van Gogh pedigree, managing to condense it into something other than a direct reference.
While there are superficial similarities between the two artists' Arlesiennes, the reference on Picasso's part is conscious but not entire. Van Gogh's paintings are noted for the liveliness with which the paintwork fills them, and yet Picasso has eschewed the older master's techniques and created a work packed with vitality in a wholly different way. The paint has in parts been deliberately left to drip and has clearly been applied with energy and enthusiasm. The drip marks themselves introduce an element of chance wholly appropriate to the Surrealist company that Picasso was keeping in Mougins.