.jpg?w=1)
Lot Essay
The year 1924 represented a transitional moment for Picasso, both personally and professionally. By 1923, his feelings for his wife Olga (née Khokhlova), who had given birth to their son Paulo in 1921, had faded. The access to high society which her ties to the Ballets Russes facilitated began to wear on the artist. His summers in the South of France and entrée into artistocratic circles seemed increasingly bourgeois in light of his new association with the Surrealists.
Formally, Picasso's cubist innovations gave way to more traditional forms of representation in the period of 1916 to 1924. This post-war rappel à l'ordre surprised his public and his critics, who had come to know Picasso as an iconoclastic innovator. But even more baffling was the sheer multiplicity of forms that Picasso embraced during these years. For even as he became preoccupied with an Ingre-esque neoclassicism, memories of Synthetic Cubism and portents of Surrealism pervaded his production.
The present work embodies Picasso's turn during this period to "linear figures seen against neutral, non-representational areas of colour," through which he was "aiming to unite the linear elements and the colouring of areas in a new synthesis" (C.P. Warncke, Pablo Picasso 1881-1973, pp. 294-295.) In the same year, Comte Etienne de Beaumont commissioned Picasso to design the ballet La Mercure, choreographed by Léonide Massine, with whom Picasso had collaborated on Parade in 1917 (fig. 1). The influence of Picasso's "curved, undulating and sinuous shapes for both décor and costume designs" can be readily observed in the present work (The Picasso Project, ed., op. cit., p. xiv).
André Breton and the Surrealists, with whom Picasso was becoming closer during this period, objected to La Mercure as a bourgeois diversion. But the mark of their avant-garde tastes can be seen in the present work, as well. The anthropomorphic shapes that underlie Picasso's figure recall Jean Arp's amoeba-like painted wood reliefs and Arpaden lithographs, and the lithe lines that describe the seated woman can be likened to the fluid automatism of Surrealists like André Masson.
The subject of the present work, however, shares more affinities with a series of seated women that Picasso executed between 1920 and 1923. These portraits of Olga, often in an armchair, epitomize the weighty fullness of the artist's neoclassicist style. The painting Femme en chemise aux mains croisées (fig. 2), for example, shares an almost identical subject with the present work. Both seated women face front, with wavy black tresses falling behind their shoulders. Both wear simple chemises that drape in folds across their laps, and both sit atop benches that horizontally contrast with the figures' round forms. But what is fleshy in the 1921 painting becomes sinuous in the present work; mass gives way to line, and modeling is pared down to areas of pure color. The folded hands of the figure in the earlier portrait become abstracted in the present work into sheer grid, an area of crosshatching that suggests the sitter may be holding a bouquet. The extremely close compositions of these two works effectively showcase Picasso's multiplicity of representational styles during this period.
(fig. 1) Pablo Picasso, Rideau de "Mercure", 1924. Musée national d'Art moderne, Centre Georges Pompidou, Paris.
(fig. 2) Pablo Picasso, Femme en chemise aux mains croisées, 1921. Staatsgalerie Stuttgart.
Formally, Picasso's cubist innovations gave way to more traditional forms of representation in the period of 1916 to 1924. This post-war rappel à l'ordre surprised his public and his critics, who had come to know Picasso as an iconoclastic innovator. But even more baffling was the sheer multiplicity of forms that Picasso embraced during these years. For even as he became preoccupied with an Ingre-esque neoclassicism, memories of Synthetic Cubism and portents of Surrealism pervaded his production.
The present work embodies Picasso's turn during this period to "linear figures seen against neutral, non-representational areas of colour," through which he was "aiming to unite the linear elements and the colouring of areas in a new synthesis" (C.P. Warncke, Pablo Picasso 1881-1973, pp. 294-295.) In the same year, Comte Etienne de Beaumont commissioned Picasso to design the ballet La Mercure, choreographed by Léonide Massine, with whom Picasso had collaborated on Parade in 1917 (fig. 1). The influence of Picasso's "curved, undulating and sinuous shapes for both décor and costume designs" can be readily observed in the present work (The Picasso Project, ed., op. cit., p. xiv).
André Breton and the Surrealists, with whom Picasso was becoming closer during this period, objected to La Mercure as a bourgeois diversion. But the mark of their avant-garde tastes can be seen in the present work, as well. The anthropomorphic shapes that underlie Picasso's figure recall Jean Arp's amoeba-like painted wood reliefs and Arpaden lithographs, and the lithe lines that describe the seated woman can be likened to the fluid automatism of Surrealists like André Masson.
The subject of the present work, however, shares more affinities with a series of seated women that Picasso executed between 1920 and 1923. These portraits of Olga, often in an armchair, epitomize the weighty fullness of the artist's neoclassicist style. The painting Femme en chemise aux mains croisées (fig. 2), for example, shares an almost identical subject with the present work. Both seated women face front, with wavy black tresses falling behind their shoulders. Both wear simple chemises that drape in folds across their laps, and both sit atop benches that horizontally contrast with the figures' round forms. But what is fleshy in the 1921 painting becomes sinuous in the present work; mass gives way to line, and modeling is pared down to areas of pure color. The folded hands of the figure in the earlier portrait become abstracted in the present work into sheer grid, an area of crosshatching that suggests the sitter may be holding a bouquet. The extremely close compositions of these two works effectively showcase Picasso's multiplicity of representational styles during this period.
(fig. 1) Pablo Picasso, Rideau de "Mercure", 1924. Musée national d'Art moderne, Centre Georges Pompidou, Paris.
(fig. 2) Pablo Picasso, Femme en chemise aux mains croisées, 1921. Staatsgalerie Stuttgart.