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拍品專文
The powerful L'Espagnole de profil, the only close-up single portrait in the picador series of June 1960, shows a maja, an attractive, young woman wearing the traditional costume of black dress and mantilla, the delicate, embroidered scarf worn over the head and shoulders. Unlike the faces of the majas in the rest of the series, the profile in the present drawing is specifically based on the features of Jacqueline Roque, the young divorcée whom Picasso met in 1952 and became his live-in companion in 1954, the year following his breakup with Françoise Gilot. They married in March 1961. Picasso often depicted Jacqueline in profile, drawing on the resemblance of this pose to that of one of the women in Delacroix's painting Les femmes d'Alger, 1834 (Musée du Louvre, Paris), on which he had based his own series of variations in 1955.
The darkly Spanish character of this drawing stems of course from its subject, but no less from the very blackness of the ink wash with which it has been rendered, which evokes the work of Goya, especially the famous black paintings that decorated his final home, the Quinta del Sordo outside Madrid. Among them is painting of a woman, known as La Leocadia (fig. 1), a portrait of Leocadia Weiss, a young woman who befriended the elderly Goya in his final years, and is alleged to have been his mistress under the guise of serving as his housekeeper. There are indeed parallels between Goya and Picasso at this stage which surely did not escape the latter artist--both were famous masters in their seventies, still painting while living out their autumn years in the seclusion of the countryside, with their quotidian as well as emotional needs attended to by much younger women. The present drawing stands out among the picador group as a double tribute, to Goya (in its overtly Spanish character) and to Jacqueline (in its implicit, coded affection), which together reveal the passionate intensity of the private, inner world of Picasso, the artist and the man.
(fig. 1) Francisco Goya y Lucientes, La Leocadia, 1820-1823. Museo del Prado, Madrid.
The darkly Spanish character of this drawing stems of course from its subject, but no less from the very blackness of the ink wash with which it has been rendered, which evokes the work of Goya, especially the famous black paintings that decorated his final home, the Quinta del Sordo outside Madrid. Among them is painting of a woman, known as La Leocadia (fig. 1), a portrait of Leocadia Weiss, a young woman who befriended the elderly Goya in his final years, and is alleged to have been his mistress under the guise of serving as his housekeeper. There are indeed parallels between Goya and Picasso at this stage which surely did not escape the latter artist--both were famous masters in their seventies, still painting while living out their autumn years in the seclusion of the countryside, with their quotidian as well as emotional needs attended to by much younger women. The present drawing stands out among the picador group as a double tribute, to Goya (in its overtly Spanish character) and to Jacqueline (in its implicit, coded affection), which together reveal the passionate intensity of the private, inner world of Picasso, the artist and the man.
(fig. 1) Francisco Goya y Lucientes, La Leocadia, 1820-1823. Museo del Prado, Madrid.