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Lot Essay
Picasso brought his painting Les demoiselles d' Avignon (Zervos, vol. 2*, no. 18; coll. The Museum of Modern Art, New York) to its final stage in the summer of 1907, and soon afterwards commenced work on Trois femmes (Zervos, vol.2*, no. 108; coll. Hermitage Museum, St. Petersburg). Picasso's progress with this large composition was painfully slow and disappointing. He completely repainted it each time he turned to it, and was still trying to finish it during the summer of 1908.
As a release from the difficulties of his studio routine Picasso, and his mistress Fernande Olivier, were fond of indulging in opium and hashish at social gatherings. At a party in late May 1908, Karl-Heinz Wiegels, a young German painter with whom Picasso and Fernande were very close, took narcotics, and in a delirium hanged himself several days later. Picasso saw his friend's body dangling in the window. The event seemed to reprise the death six years earlier of Picasso's closest friend in Barcelona, Carles Casagemas, who was similarly addicted. Wiegels's death so frightened Picasso and Fernande that they resolved to stop using drugs.
The summer offered little relief to the anxiety and depression caused by the death of Wiegels. The weather was unbearably hot; Picasso would paint naked in his sweltering studio in the Bateau-Lavoir as Fernande wandered about fanning herself, dressed only in a light shift. Although most of their friends had already left town, Picasso and Fernande stayed in Paris through July. Finally, at the suggestion of their doctor, they fled the city in early August and rented a primitive farmhouse in the hamlet of La Rue-des-Bois, near Verneuil, north of Paris, on the Oise River bordering the Fôret d'Halatte. Picasso wrote to Leo and Sarah Stein: "This summer in the studio with the heat and so much work to do finally made me ill. I have been here a few days and already feel much better" (J. Richardson, A Life of Picasso 1907-1917, The Painter of Modern Life, New York, 1996, p. 93).
Picasso and Fernande remained in La Rue-des-Bois for about a month before returning to Paris in early September. In these rustic surroundings Picasso painted wooded landscapes, still-lives, and figure studies inspired by Madame Putman, the stout and earthy peasant wife of the owner of the farmstead. The present painting gives some idea of the heat that summer: the declining disc of the sun still burns hotly in the sky, and even the water in the river below glows and simmers with its reflection. The light reaches outward through the prism-shaped opening between the trees in the center of the composition, amplified and scattered throughout the landscape as if passing through a crystal. The landscape is rendered in smoldering, red oxide tones, relieved only by smaller patches of green.
The jagged, shard-like forms create an almost apocalyptic vision of nature, and prefigure the Gothic tensions in later German expressionist painting. Troubling memories of Wiegels's tragic end still appear to fill Picasso's thoughts. One senses an almost tormented sense of subjectivity that compels the artist to become one with the landscape. John Richardson wrote: "Since he could never depict anything without to some degree identifying with it, Picasso assumes the role of genius loci in landscapes that constitute his first sustained confrontation with nature. He invests the trees with his own life force, as if he were God reinventing the universe in his image. 'I want to see my branches grow that's why I started to paint trees; yet I never paint them from nature. My trees are myself.' [Picasso] completes the anthropomorphic process in the Rue-des-Bois landscapes, banishing the figures and energizing the trees as if they were so many self-portraits" (ibid., p. 93).
On his return to Paris Picasso completed Trois femmes, and using his recent landscape studies, he reworked the natural setting in Nu dans le fôret (La Dryade) (Zervos, vol. 2*, no. 113; coll. Hermitage Museum, St. Petersburg). Henri Matisse is said to have laughed at Picasso's Trois femmes when he viewed it at the Bateau-Lavoir that fall, and he was on the jury that refused to accept Braque's recent L'Estaque landscapes for 1908 Salon d'Automne. When dealer Daniel-Henry Kahnweiler showed Braque's pictures in his small gallery, Matisse described them as being made of "petites cubes." At the time no one could understand the significance of this off-hand jibe, and few had any inkling that the Paris art world about to witness the most radical re-thinking of pictorial reality in Western art since the Renaissance.
As a release from the difficulties of his studio routine Picasso, and his mistress Fernande Olivier, were fond of indulging in opium and hashish at social gatherings. At a party in late May 1908, Karl-Heinz Wiegels, a young German painter with whom Picasso and Fernande were very close, took narcotics, and in a delirium hanged himself several days later. Picasso saw his friend's body dangling in the window. The event seemed to reprise the death six years earlier of Picasso's closest friend in Barcelona, Carles Casagemas, who was similarly addicted. Wiegels's death so frightened Picasso and Fernande that they resolved to stop using drugs.
The summer offered little relief to the anxiety and depression caused by the death of Wiegels. The weather was unbearably hot; Picasso would paint naked in his sweltering studio in the Bateau-Lavoir as Fernande wandered about fanning herself, dressed only in a light shift. Although most of their friends had already left town, Picasso and Fernande stayed in Paris through July. Finally, at the suggestion of their doctor, they fled the city in early August and rented a primitive farmhouse in the hamlet of La Rue-des-Bois, near Verneuil, north of Paris, on the Oise River bordering the Fôret d'Halatte. Picasso wrote to Leo and Sarah Stein: "This summer in the studio with the heat and so much work to do finally made me ill. I have been here a few days and already feel much better" (J. Richardson, A Life of Picasso 1907-1917, The Painter of Modern Life, New York, 1996, p. 93).
Picasso and Fernande remained in La Rue-des-Bois for about a month before returning to Paris in early September. In these rustic surroundings Picasso painted wooded landscapes, still-lives, and figure studies inspired by Madame Putman, the stout and earthy peasant wife of the owner of the farmstead. The present painting gives some idea of the heat that summer: the declining disc of the sun still burns hotly in the sky, and even the water in the river below glows and simmers with its reflection. The light reaches outward through the prism-shaped opening between the trees in the center of the composition, amplified and scattered throughout the landscape as if passing through a crystal. The landscape is rendered in smoldering, red oxide tones, relieved only by smaller patches of green.
The jagged, shard-like forms create an almost apocalyptic vision of nature, and prefigure the Gothic tensions in later German expressionist painting. Troubling memories of Wiegels's tragic end still appear to fill Picasso's thoughts. One senses an almost tormented sense of subjectivity that compels the artist to become one with the landscape. John Richardson wrote: "Since he could never depict anything without to some degree identifying with it, Picasso assumes the role of genius loci in landscapes that constitute his first sustained confrontation with nature. He invests the trees with his own life force, as if he were God reinventing the universe in his image. 'I want to see my branches grow that's why I started to paint trees; yet I never paint them from nature. My trees are myself.' [Picasso] completes the anthropomorphic process in the Rue-des-Bois landscapes, banishing the figures and energizing the trees as if they were so many self-portraits" (ibid., p. 93).
On his return to Paris Picasso completed Trois femmes, and using his recent landscape studies, he reworked the natural setting in Nu dans le fôret (La Dryade) (Zervos, vol. 2*, no. 113; coll. Hermitage Museum, St. Petersburg). Henri Matisse is said to have laughed at Picasso's Trois femmes when he viewed it at the Bateau-Lavoir that fall, and he was on the jury that refused to accept Braque's recent L'Estaque landscapes for 1908 Salon d'Automne. When dealer Daniel-Henry Kahnweiler showed Braque's pictures in his small gallery, Matisse described them as being made of "petites cubes." At the time no one could understand the significance of this off-hand jibe, and few had any inkling that the Paris art world about to witness the most radical re-thinking of pictorial reality in Western art since the Renaissance.