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Lot Essay
This work is sold with a photo-certificate from Maya Widmaier-Picasso.
In her memoir, Life with Picasso, Françoise Gilot recalled that 'During the spring of 1953 Pablo was intrigued by two silhouettes he used to see in an old pottery across from his studio in the Rue de Fournas [in Vallauris]. They belonged to a girl named Sylvette David and her fiancé, a young Englishman who designed and assembled very unusual chairs... Sylvette's fiancé made one up and brought it to us one evening as a gift... Since it was obvious that Sylvette and her fiancé were barely doing enough business to get by, Pablo ordered two more like the one they had given him and a third one somewhat smaller... After this Pablo decided that Sylvette, with her blond pony tail and long bangs, had very pictorial features and he began to make portraits of her' (p. 352).
Françoise left Picasso in September 1953, taking their children Claude and Paloma with her back to Paris. Picasso also spent that fall in Paris, and when he returned to Vallauris in November, the villa La Galloise was deserted, and he was alone for the first time in many years. That winter, during this private crisis, he produced the 180 drawings on the theme of the artist and model that Tériade published in Verve. In April 1954 Picasso engaged Sylvette to pose for him. Between April and June he made most of the 21 drawings and 28 paintings, as well as several cut-out metal sculptures and ceramics, which display her attractively kittenish features (fig. 1). She resembled Brigitte Bardot, who was born in the same year (1934), and made her screen debut in 1952. Vera Hausdorff has pointed out that 'For Picasso, the young girl was the incarnation of his idea of Nordic beauty... With her hairstyle and fashionable clothes, she fully embodied the type of teenager that displaced the unsophisticated adolescent in the 1950s' (in Picasso et les femmes, exh. cat., Kunstsammlungen Chemnitz, 2002, p. 312). Sylvette was an aspiring painter as well, as Françoise had been when Picasso met her a decade earlier. Pierre Daix has written that Sylvette 'was twenty [more correctly, not yet nineteen-and-a-half years old], with a body which would shake the vows of the most saintly ascetic... Picasso glowed with enthusiasm and spoke of her with such warmth that I suspected he had fallen in love' (in Picasso: Life and Art, New York, 1993, p. 318).
If Picasso was actually so strongly attracted to Sylvette, there was, alas, nothing to be done, because Toby Jellinek, her fiancé, knew well enough that he should remain present whenever his girlfriend posed for the artist. Picasso turned his thoughts to the work at hand, and pursued his theme of the artist and his model, this time with a real young woman seated before him. Daix went on to say, 'The challenge posed by Sylvette was in fact the challenge of a new kind of woman... How to capture the secret of her youth? The secret of painting? If one regards this romance in drawing as a form of parenthesis, it was at this point that Picasso's art definitively entered the postwar world... This shift for Picasso represented Post-Communism... He had never been so entirely free - he knew it, and gave himself to this new liberty wholeheartedly' (ibid.).
The demeanor of these paintings and drawings display the broad range of Picasso's late stylistic repertoire, ranging from angular and geometric transcriptions of her features (fig. 2), to more softly characterized and realistic portraits. The drawings, for the most part, are of the latter kind, and display an excitingly contemporary, glamourous and impassioned take on Ingres' classicized realism. Mme Hausdorff has noted that 'In the Sylvette cycle Picasso pursued an idea of beauty that was in the air. Picasso was fascinated with this new femininity and attempted to uncover its essence. The fashionable pony tail was also connected with the new womanly ideal of the woman-child - the sporty, active girl whose attractiveness lay in her natural and uninhibited movements. She unconventionally disregarded traditional role models and began asserting her own independence' (op. cit., p. 316).
Picasso usually depicted Sylvette in profile and three-quarter views. The present drawing is one of only several that record her face-on, and it is surely the most tender and intimate of all of the images in the Sylvette cycle. This is, in fact, the drawing that Picasso presented to Sylvette in gratitude for having posed for him. Sylvette subsequently sold it, with the artist's approval, to the mother of the present owner, so that she could marry Toby Jellinek in 1956 and live in Paris. She moved to London in 1964, and later re-married. Today, known as Lydia Corbett, she lives and paints in southwest England.
The outstanding quality of this drawing was fully appreciated by Picasso's legendary dealer Daniel-Henry Kahweiler, who, in 1966, was invited by Lionel Prejger to preface the jewel-like catalogue of the exhibition Picasso. Dessins & Aquarelles at the Galerie Knoedler in Paris. Praising the selection of the works on paper on view, Kahnweiler called the show 'une des meilleures expositions de Picasso dessinateur ayant jamais eu lieu... un document d'une importance capitale'. The present Sylvette was the work chosen to represent one of the pivotel phases of Picasso's long artistic career - the artist's encounter with one of his most seductive young muses.
(fig. 1) Sylvette David in 1954, holding the present drawing.
(fig. 2) P. Picasso, Portrait de Sylvette David, 1954 (Kunsthalle Bremen)
© Succession Picasso DACS 2006
© Kunsthalle Bremen
In her memoir, Life with Picasso, Françoise Gilot recalled that 'During the spring of 1953 Pablo was intrigued by two silhouettes he used to see in an old pottery across from his studio in the Rue de Fournas [in Vallauris]. They belonged to a girl named Sylvette David and her fiancé, a young Englishman who designed and assembled very unusual chairs... Sylvette's fiancé made one up and brought it to us one evening as a gift... Since it was obvious that Sylvette and her fiancé were barely doing enough business to get by, Pablo ordered two more like the one they had given him and a third one somewhat smaller... After this Pablo decided that Sylvette, with her blond pony tail and long bangs, had very pictorial features and he began to make portraits of her' (p. 352).
Françoise left Picasso in September 1953, taking their children Claude and Paloma with her back to Paris. Picasso also spent that fall in Paris, and when he returned to Vallauris in November, the villa La Galloise was deserted, and he was alone for the first time in many years. That winter, during this private crisis, he produced the 180 drawings on the theme of the artist and model that Tériade published in Verve. In April 1954 Picasso engaged Sylvette to pose for him. Between April and June he made most of the 21 drawings and 28 paintings, as well as several cut-out metal sculptures and ceramics, which display her attractively kittenish features (fig. 1). She resembled Brigitte Bardot, who was born in the same year (1934), and made her screen debut in 1952. Vera Hausdorff has pointed out that 'For Picasso, the young girl was the incarnation of his idea of Nordic beauty... With her hairstyle and fashionable clothes, she fully embodied the type of teenager that displaced the unsophisticated adolescent in the 1950s' (in Picasso et les femmes, exh. cat., Kunstsammlungen Chemnitz, 2002, p. 312). Sylvette was an aspiring painter as well, as Françoise had been when Picasso met her a decade earlier. Pierre Daix has written that Sylvette 'was twenty [more correctly, not yet nineteen-and-a-half years old], with a body which would shake the vows of the most saintly ascetic... Picasso glowed with enthusiasm and spoke of her with such warmth that I suspected he had fallen in love' (in Picasso: Life and Art, New York, 1993, p. 318).
If Picasso was actually so strongly attracted to Sylvette, there was, alas, nothing to be done, because Toby Jellinek, her fiancé, knew well enough that he should remain present whenever his girlfriend posed for the artist. Picasso turned his thoughts to the work at hand, and pursued his theme of the artist and his model, this time with a real young woman seated before him. Daix went on to say, 'The challenge posed by Sylvette was in fact the challenge of a new kind of woman... How to capture the secret of her youth? The secret of painting? If one regards this romance in drawing as a form of parenthesis, it was at this point that Picasso's art definitively entered the postwar world... This shift for Picasso represented Post-Communism... He had never been so entirely free - he knew it, and gave himself to this new liberty wholeheartedly' (ibid.).
The demeanor of these paintings and drawings display the broad range of Picasso's late stylistic repertoire, ranging from angular and geometric transcriptions of her features (fig. 2), to more softly characterized and realistic portraits. The drawings, for the most part, are of the latter kind, and display an excitingly contemporary, glamourous and impassioned take on Ingres' classicized realism. Mme Hausdorff has noted that 'In the Sylvette cycle Picasso pursued an idea of beauty that was in the air. Picasso was fascinated with this new femininity and attempted to uncover its essence. The fashionable pony tail was also connected with the new womanly ideal of the woman-child - the sporty, active girl whose attractiveness lay in her natural and uninhibited movements. She unconventionally disregarded traditional role models and began asserting her own independence' (op. cit., p. 316).
Picasso usually depicted Sylvette in profile and three-quarter views. The present drawing is one of only several that record her face-on, and it is surely the most tender and intimate of all of the images in the Sylvette cycle. This is, in fact, the drawing that Picasso presented to Sylvette in gratitude for having posed for him. Sylvette subsequently sold it, with the artist's approval, to the mother of the present owner, so that she could marry Toby Jellinek in 1956 and live in Paris. She moved to London in 1964, and later re-married. Today, known as Lydia Corbett, she lives and paints in southwest England.
The outstanding quality of this drawing was fully appreciated by Picasso's legendary dealer Daniel-Henry Kahweiler, who, in 1966, was invited by Lionel Prejger to preface the jewel-like catalogue of the exhibition Picasso. Dessins & Aquarelles at the Galerie Knoedler in Paris. Praising the selection of the works on paper on view, Kahnweiler called the show 'une des meilleures expositions de Picasso dessinateur ayant jamais eu lieu... un document d'une importance capitale'. The present Sylvette was the work chosen to represent one of the pivotel phases of Picasso's long artistic career - the artist's encounter with one of his most seductive young muses.
(fig. 1) Sylvette David in 1954, holding the present drawing.
(fig. 2) P. Picasso, Portrait de Sylvette David, 1954 (Kunsthalle Bremen)
© Succession Picasso DACS 2006
© Kunsthalle Bremen