.jpg?w=1)
Lot Essay
This work is sold with two photo-certificates, one from Maya Widmaier Picasso and one from Claude Picasso.
Dessin is part of a series of head studies executed between March and June 1926. This head first appears in a small oil sketch Head of a Woman (Zervos VII, no. 6) on the 20th March, and is followed by several pen and ink studies executed in a sketchbook between March and June (cf. Glimcher 92).
In his later years, most of Picasso's portraits are of women, and usually depict the woman (or women) in his life at the time. The woman depicted in Dessin is a hybrid between his wife Olga and his possibly new lover Marie-Thérèse. Picasso married Olga in 1918, however by 1923 the artist's feelings for his wife had cooled as Olga suffered from a bipolar disorder and had become increasingly difficult to live with. In 1925 Picasso began to employ the image of a divided face, with a profile superimposed on a frontal view, so that the face of the subject appears to be two people in one. This imagery, implying a split personality, strongly suggests Olga's condition. Picasso soon went on to initiate a relationship with Marie-Thérèse Walter, a young girl still in her teens, in 1927 -- some have claimed as early as 1925. The divided face would subsequently come to represent, in this evolving situation, Picasso's own duelling emotions, in which his increasingly complex feelings were now split between two very different women.
Dessin, in addition to hinting at this intriguing psychological content, displays a newly expressive imaging of the face very different from the grand neoclassical heads and figures that Picasso had been painting only a few years before.
Dessin is part of a series of head studies executed between March and June 1926. This head first appears in a small oil sketch Head of a Woman (Zervos VII, no. 6) on the 20th March, and is followed by several pen and ink studies executed in a sketchbook between March and June (cf. Glimcher 92).
In his later years, most of Picasso's portraits are of women, and usually depict the woman (or women) in his life at the time. The woman depicted in Dessin is a hybrid between his wife Olga and his possibly new lover Marie-Thérèse. Picasso married Olga in 1918, however by 1923 the artist's feelings for his wife had cooled as Olga suffered from a bipolar disorder and had become increasingly difficult to live with. In 1925 Picasso began to employ the image of a divided face, with a profile superimposed on a frontal view, so that the face of the subject appears to be two people in one. This imagery, implying a split personality, strongly suggests Olga's condition. Picasso soon went on to initiate a relationship with Marie-Thérèse Walter, a young girl still in her teens, in 1927 -- some have claimed as early as 1925. The divided face would subsequently come to represent, in this evolving situation, Picasso's own duelling emotions, in which his increasingly complex feelings were now split between two very different women.
Dessin, in addition to hinting at this intriguing psychological content, displays a newly expressive imaging of the face very different from the grand neoclassical heads and figures that Picasso had been painting only a few years before.