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Lot Essay
This lot is sold with the book Le désir attrapé par la queue by Pablo Picasso, which is the press copy of the first edition published by Gallimard in 1945.
This work is sold with two photo-certificates, one from Maya Widmaier Picasso and one from Claude Picasso.
Picasso executed this portrait of his lover Dora Maar, and dedicated it to her, on the opening flyleaf in a first-edition copy of his play Le désir attrapé par la queue ('Desire Caught by the Tail'), which Gallimard published in February 1945. Picasso had been writing poetry in a freely associative manner since 1935. Le désir, in six acts, is the first of two plays that Picasso authored; he wrote the second, Les quatre petites filles, in late 1947-1948. The photographer Brassaï, a close friend of the artist and a frequent visitor during the war years, recalled: 'Picasso wrote this diversion in Royan in four days -- between 14 and 17 January 1941 -- in a school notebook. He... gave free rein to dreams, obsessions, unavowed desires, comical connections between ideas and words, everyday banalities, the absurd. In it, Picasso's humor and inexhaustible spirit are displayed in their pure state. Everything that pre-occupied him during those few uniform days in Royan -- the harsh winter, the German Occupation, the hardship, the isolation, the suspicion, the pleasures of the bedroom and kitchen -- is the driving force behind his burlesque characters: Bigfoot, Onion, Tart, and so on' (in Conversations with Picasso, Chicago, 1999, p. 200).
A public performance of the play during the Occupation was impossible -- the Germans had forbidden Picasso to exhibit his work -- and it was at some risk that friends of the artist, many of whom were involved in the Resistance, organized a private reading in the apartment of Michel Leiris on 19 March 1944. Picasso could count on a stellar cast; the actress Zanie de Campan took the leading female role of the Tart, and other parts were read by Leiris, his wife Louise, Jean-Paul Sartre, Simone de Beauvoir, Raymond Queneau, Georges and Germaine Hugnet, Jean Aubier, and Dora Maar. Albert Camus directed the performance, which was attended by Braque and more than a hundred other artists and literati. Brassaï took a group photograph of some of the participants during the reception held afterwards in Picasso's studio (fig. 1).
This 1945 drawing of Dora was done near the end of her relationship with Picasso, who was already seeing Françoise Gilot, a young and aspiring artist, in a developing liaison that he took pains to hide from his older mistress. This portrayal of Dora does indeed possess the character of a valedictory or even a formal commemorative monument, a bust set on a plinth as if in some public place, with the proclamation 'DORA MAAR GRAND PEINTRE.' The formal elements seen here derive from a wash study, Tête de femme, which Picasso had done on 29 April 1944 (Picasso Project, no. 45-054; sale, Sotheby's, New York, 12 November 1988, lot 141B). The hatched shading and curvilinear shapes recall the beautiful series of bather drawings that Picasso executed at Dinard during the summer of 1928, at the height of his engagement with Surrealism, and perhaps meaningfully, when he was involved in another developing intimacy, then with the youthful Marie-Thérèse Walter.
The dedication refers to the fact that during her relationship with Picasso, Dora, who was an accomplished and noted photographer, took up painting. After she parted from Picasso -- a devastating experience that resulted in a mental breakdown, a period of institutionalization and therapy -- she made painting a central part of her new life, even if she made no pretense to her importance as an artist. James Lord, who befriended Dora during this period, wrote, '[Picasso] had once given her a drawing, a very distorted portrait of her, inscribed For Dora Maar, Great Painter. She understood that the inscription was no less a distortion than the image'" (op. cit.). She initially never intended to show the drawing to anyone, as she told Lord at the time, but apparently relented in 1957, when it was illustrated as the frontispiece in an exhibition catalogue of her paintings (op. cit.).
(fig. 1) At the reception following the reading of Picasso's Le désir attrapé par le queue, 19 March 1944. Standing, from left: Jacques Lacan, Cécile Eluard, Pierre Reverdy, Louise Leiris, Zanie de Campan, Picasso, Valentine Hugo, Simone de Beauvoir. Seated, from left: Jean-Paul Sartre, Albert Camus, Michel Leiris, Jean Aubier, and Picasso's Afghan hound, Kazbek. (Photo: Brassaï); © Estate Brassaï and RMN, Paris, 2007.
This work is sold with two photo-certificates, one from Maya Widmaier Picasso and one from Claude Picasso.
Picasso executed this portrait of his lover Dora Maar, and dedicated it to her, on the opening flyleaf in a first-edition copy of his play Le désir attrapé par la queue ('Desire Caught by the Tail'), which Gallimard published in February 1945. Picasso had been writing poetry in a freely associative manner since 1935. Le désir, in six acts, is the first of two plays that Picasso authored; he wrote the second, Les quatre petites filles, in late 1947-1948. The photographer Brassaï, a close friend of the artist and a frequent visitor during the war years, recalled: 'Picasso wrote this diversion in Royan in four days -- between 14 and 17 January 1941 -- in a school notebook. He... gave free rein to dreams, obsessions, unavowed desires, comical connections between ideas and words, everyday banalities, the absurd. In it, Picasso's humor and inexhaustible spirit are displayed in their pure state. Everything that pre-occupied him during those few uniform days in Royan -- the harsh winter, the German Occupation, the hardship, the isolation, the suspicion, the pleasures of the bedroom and kitchen -- is the driving force behind his burlesque characters: Bigfoot, Onion, Tart, and so on' (in Conversations with Picasso, Chicago, 1999, p. 200).
A public performance of the play during the Occupation was impossible -- the Germans had forbidden Picasso to exhibit his work -- and it was at some risk that friends of the artist, many of whom were involved in the Resistance, organized a private reading in the apartment of Michel Leiris on 19 March 1944. Picasso could count on a stellar cast; the actress Zanie de Campan took the leading female role of the Tart, and other parts were read by Leiris, his wife Louise, Jean-Paul Sartre, Simone de Beauvoir, Raymond Queneau, Georges and Germaine Hugnet, Jean Aubier, and Dora Maar. Albert Camus directed the performance, which was attended by Braque and more than a hundred other artists and literati. Brassaï took a group photograph of some of the participants during the reception held afterwards in Picasso's studio (fig. 1).
This 1945 drawing of Dora was done near the end of her relationship with Picasso, who was already seeing Françoise Gilot, a young and aspiring artist, in a developing liaison that he took pains to hide from his older mistress. This portrayal of Dora does indeed possess the character of a valedictory or even a formal commemorative monument, a bust set on a plinth as if in some public place, with the proclamation 'DORA MAAR GRAND PEINTRE.' The formal elements seen here derive from a wash study, Tête de femme, which Picasso had done on 29 April 1944 (Picasso Project, no. 45-054; sale, Sotheby's, New York, 12 November 1988, lot 141B). The hatched shading and curvilinear shapes recall the beautiful series of bather drawings that Picasso executed at Dinard during the summer of 1928, at the height of his engagement with Surrealism, and perhaps meaningfully, when he was involved in another developing intimacy, then with the youthful Marie-Thérèse Walter.
The dedication refers to the fact that during her relationship with Picasso, Dora, who was an accomplished and noted photographer, took up painting. After she parted from Picasso -- a devastating experience that resulted in a mental breakdown, a period of institutionalization and therapy -- she made painting a central part of her new life, even if she made no pretense to her importance as an artist. James Lord, who befriended Dora during this period, wrote, '[Picasso] had once given her a drawing, a very distorted portrait of her, inscribed For Dora Maar, Great Painter. She understood that the inscription was no less a distortion than the image'" (op. cit.). She initially never intended to show the drawing to anyone, as she told Lord at the time, but apparently relented in 1957, when it was illustrated as the frontispiece in an exhibition catalogue of her paintings (op. cit.).
(fig. 1) At the reception following the reading of Picasso's Le désir attrapé par le queue, 19 March 1944. Standing, from left: Jacques Lacan, Cécile Eluard, Pierre Reverdy, Louise Leiris, Zanie de Campan, Picasso, Valentine Hugo, Simone de Beauvoir. Seated, from left: Jean-Paul Sartre, Albert Camus, Michel Leiris, Jean Aubier, and Picasso's Afghan hound, Kazbek. (Photo: Brassaï); © Estate Brassaï and RMN, Paris, 2007.