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Lot Essay
Each of the 8 drawings by Pablo Picasso is sold with a photo-certificate by Maya Widmaier Picasso, signed Paris, le 30 septembre de l'An 2001.
One of the earliest, seminal essays on Picasso's Guernica appeared in the Cahiers d'art, no. 4-5 of 1937: 'Le Mystère tremble: Picasso furioso', by the art critic and close friend of the artist José Bergamin y Gutierrez, to whom this 1836 edition of Francisco Montes' classic manual of bullfighting belonged. He had the leaves of the book interleaved with sheets of pale blue paper, which he filled with 113 original compositions by the most famous Spanish and French artist of his generation. The result is an extraordinary anthology of pen and ink sketches, collages, and colour-saturated drawings by Picasso, Dalí, Dominguez, Clavé and their contemporaries - all centred on the theme of the corrida. Compositionally, each artist brilliantly tested his inspiration against the constraints of the leaf's dimensions and the juxtaposition with the 19th Century typography of the book, with daring foreshortening of the arena's perspective and powerful distortions of the toreadors' figures. The artists took up the challenge of interpreting the commissioned theme with diverse and ingenious creations, from Picasso's ink-imbued homages to the bull, to Dalí's erotic nymph of the corrida, and Domiguez' witty toro maricón.
One of the earliest, seminal essays on Picasso's Guernica appeared in the Cahiers d'art, no. 4-5 of 1937: 'Le Mystère tremble: Picasso furioso', by the art critic and close friend of the artist José Bergamin y Gutierrez, to whom this 1836 edition of Francisco Montes' classic manual of bullfighting belonged. He had the leaves of the book interleaved with sheets of pale blue paper, which he filled with 113 original compositions by the most famous Spanish and French artist of his generation. The result is an extraordinary anthology of pen and ink sketches, collages, and colour-saturated drawings by Picasso, Dalí, Dominguez, Clavé and their contemporaries - all centred on the theme of the corrida. Compositionally, each artist brilliantly tested his inspiration against the constraints of the leaf's dimensions and the juxtaposition with the 19th Century typography of the book, with daring foreshortening of the arena's perspective and powerful distortions of the toreadors' figures. The artists took up the challenge of interpreting the commissioned theme with diverse and ingenious creations, from Picasso's ink-imbued homages to the bull, to Dalí's erotic nymph of the corrida, and Domiguez' witty toro maricón.