Pablo Picasso (1881-1973)
Artist's Resale Right ("Droit de Suite"). Artist's… 显示更多 ABSTRACTION BEYOND BORDERS: WORKS FROM A DISTINGUISHED PRIVATE EUROPEAN COLLECTIONFrom Paris to Munich, Berlin, Milan and Hanover, in the opening decades of the Twentieth Century, a number of artists created art that radically differed from those of their predecessors. Working across Europe, these pioneering provocateurs, radicals and trailblazers – Georges Braque, Francis Picabia, František Kupka, to name just a few – shunned the last vestiges of illusionism to instead create unprecedented works with no visible, recognisable or definable subject matter. Liberating colour, line and form from their centuries-old descriptive role, they overturned pictorial tradition, embarking on an abstract adventure that would come to define art of the Twentieth Century. Crossing geographical boundaries, encompassing a variety of media, and often blurring traditional distinctions of painting and sculpture, abstraction spread with an extraordinary speed, transforming artistic practice forever. From the initial steps towards a new artistic language, to the paradigmatic embodiment of this concept, this diverse group of works embodies this varied, experimental and groundbreaking path of abstraction, demonstrating the variety of ways that artists across the globe embraced this radical practice. Braque’s cubist composition, Cartes et cornet à dés presents the origin of this move towards a new, non-representational artistic language. Along with Picasso – the pair, ‘like mountain-climbers roped together’, as Braque recalled of this frenzied period of seismic innovation – the artist undermined conventional notions of perspective, opening the door to a whole new way of depicting the world. As rebellious as the cubists’ rejection of the centuries-old rules of representation, Picabia’s playful collage Sans titre (Pot de fleurs) uses the very materials of art making to parody the mimetic traditions of art, creating a semi-abstract play of colour and line. Far removed from any trace of the recognisable world, Kurt Schwitters’ rare Merz relief, Das Richard-Freitag-Bild dates from the height of his involvement with the International Constructivist movement. It was executed during a period when he was codifying Merz – the one-man art movement that he created in 1919 – into a utopian Constructivist language of form, taking the deconstruction of Dada and combining it with the aims of Constructivism. Following the same aesthetic, Georges Vantongerloo’s perfectly composed De Stijl composition embodies the tenets of geometric abstraction. In addition, Kupka, one of the leading pioneers of non-representational abstraction, is represented in this collection with a rare composition entitled Series C, III, Elevation, a work that marries his elegant abstract idiom with the deeper, spiritual dimension that was often the source of his abstractions. By contrast, Magritte, an artist whose unique form of Surrealism serves as the very antithesis to the development of non-representational abstraction, is represented in this group with an important early painting, Les signes du soir. A pictorial trompe l’oeil riddle, with this painting Magritte confuses, undermines and questions the entire nature of representational painting, paving the way for the conceptual art that dominated artistic production of the post-war era. From the purely formal – Schwitters and Vantongerloo – to the spiritual, mystic or surreal – Kupka, Jawlensky, Magritte and Picasso, this collection, assembled with the eye of an aesthete, encapsulates the multi-faceted nature and pioneering spirit of modernist abstraction throughout the Twentieth Century. Their curiosity, daring eclecticism and pioneering spirit of exploration nearly 100 years ago paved the way for artists and collectors today.
Pablo Picasso (1881-1973)

Tête de femme (Dora Maar)

细节
Pablo Picasso (1881-1973)
Tête de femme (Dora Maar)
signed 'Picasso' (on the reverse); dated '5.juin 41' (on the stretcher)
oil on canvas
16 1/4 x 13 1/8 in. (41 x 33.2 cm.)
Painted in Paris on 5 June 1941
来源
Marie Cuttoli & Henri Laugier, by 1955 until at least 1966.
Galería Theo, Madrid (no. 378).
Galerie Gmurzynska, Cologne.
Acquired from the above by the present owner in 1996.
出版
C. Zervos, Pablo Picasso, vol. 11, Oeuvres de 1940 et 1941, Paris, 1960, no. 153, n.p. (illustrated pl. 65).
展览
Paris, Galerie Max Kaganovitch, 1951.
Paris, Galerie Max Kaganovitch, Dessins, Aquarelles, Tableaux, Sculptures des XIX et XX siècles, May - June 1966, no. 77, n.p.
Paris, Grand Palais, Hommage à Pablo Picasso, November 1966 - February 1967, no. 193 (illustrated n.p.)
Cologne, Galerie Gmurzynska, Pablo Picasso: Don Hilario Cuernajón, April - July 1996, pp. 38-39 (illustrated p. 37 & illustrated in situ, n.p.).
Basel, Kunstmuseum Basel, Die Picassos sind da! Eine Retrospecktive aus Basler Sammlungen, March - July 2013, no. 71, p. 154 (illustrated p. 150).
注意事项
Artist's Resale Right ("Droit de Suite"). Artist's Resale Right Regulations 2006 apply to this lot, the buyer agrees to pay us an amount equal to the resale royalty provided for in those Regulations, and we undertake to the buyer to pay such amount to the artist's collection agent. These lots have been imported from outside the EU for sale using a Temporary Import regime. Import VAT is payable (at 5%) on the Hammer price. VAT is also payable (at 20%) on the buyer’s Premium on a VAT inclusive basis. When a buyer of such a lot has registered an EU address but wishes to export the lot or complete the import into another EU country, he must advise Christie's immediately after the auction.

拍品专文

‘In love doesn’t quite sum up Picasso’s feelings towards Dora. I think he was obsessed with her, a passionate sexual love. It was not that Dora was so beautiful – she was far more interesting than that. She added a whole new class and layer to his other mistresses’
(J. Richardson, quoted in L. Baring, Dora Maar: Paris in the Time of Man Ray, Jean Cocteau, and Picasso, New York, 2017, p. 164)

‘After Picasso, God’
(Dora Maar, quoted in L. Baring, Dora Maar: Paris in the Time of Man Ray, Jean Cocteau, and Picasso, New York, 2017, p. 215)

Painted on 5 June 1941, as the Second World War raged across Europe, and Paris was occupied by German forces, Tête de femme (Dora Maar) is a striking and intimate portrait of Pablo Picasso’s great wartime lover and muse, Dora Maar. The fiercely intellectual, Spanish speaking Surrealist photographer and later painter, Dora served as the model for some of the most powerful and moving portraits of Picasso’s career. Together the couple lived through some of the most turbulent years of the Twentieth Century, their love affair bookended by the outbreak of the Spanish Civil War, and the end of the Second World War. Yet throughout this, their relationship served as a source of deep inspiration and impetus for their art making and poetry; as Anne Baldassari has written, their intense artistic dialogue made them ‘an unrivalled artist couple in the history of the avant-garde, proving one of the most exacting and genuine exchanges in all modern art’ (A. Baldessari, Picasso: Life with Dora Maar: Love and War 1935-1945, Paris, 2006, p. 26). In Picasso’s art, Dora’s image became the site of myriad distortions, exaggerations and reconfigurations, as the artist radically expanded the possibilities of portraiture. Her face became the site for the artist to explore his deepest feelings, conveying his angst and disbelief at the horrific events that unfolded in his native Spain and the wider world, as well as reflecting moments of the intensely felt joy, love and passion he felt for his lover.

As if caught turning her head, Tête de femme (Dora Maar) reflects the intimacy and intensity of Picasso and Dora’s passionate, often turbulent relationship. The day that he painted the present work, the artist also completed two other oil paintings of Dora: La femme à la collerette bleue (Zervos 11, no. 150), which now resides in the Moderna Museet, Stockholm, and Buste de femme (Zervos 11, no. 194), both of which capture Maar in a blue collared top, her powerful gaze evident in each portrait, framed by voluminous waves of her luxuriant dark hair. The abundance of portraits from this period reflects not only the intensity of their relationship, but also the increasingly secluded life that Picasso was living at this time.

After the Nazi invasion of Paris in 1940, Picasso decided, despite various offers of refuge, to remain in the French capital. Living and working in his cavernous studio on the rue des Grands-Augustins, Picasso immersed himself in his work. Deemed a ‘degenerate’ artist by Hitler and purportedly forbidden to exhibit his work in Paris, Picasso lived a much quieter life, removed from the pre-war artistic and bourgeois society he had been a part of, and often visited in his studio by Nazi soldiers. Unable to travel, Picasso turned to his immediate surroundings as subject matter, resulting in a proliferation of portraits of Dora Maar and the hauntingly powerful series of still-lifes that he painted throughout the war years.

Over the course of their relationship, Picasso became obsessed by Dora Maar’s face, appearance and mannerisms, depicting her in an astounding number of iterations. The pair had first met in Paris at the end of 1935 or the beginning of 1936, depending on different accounts, introduced by their mutual friend, the poet Paul Éluard. This raven-haired beauty proved irresistible to the Spanish artist. Immediately beguiled, he was attracted to her dark intensity, struck by her gaze that was said to be as powerful as his own notorious mirada fuerte. More than her looks however, Dora was independent, politically engaged, intellectual and deeply enigmatic, as well as a successful photographer in her own right; and, to the artist’s delight, she also spoke Spanish, replying to his initial French introduction in his native tongue. ‘In love doesn’t quite sum up Picasso’s feelings towards Dora’, the artist’s biographer John Richardson has recently explained. ‘I think he was obsessed with her, a passionate sexual love. It was not that Dora was so beautiful – she was far more interesting than that. She added a whole new class and layer to his other mistresses’ (J. Richardson, quoted in L. Baring, Dora Maar: Paris in the Time of Man Ray, Jean Cocteau, and Picasso, New York, 2017, p. 164).

As he did with each new woman in his life, Picasso first absorbed every aspect of Dora’s face, depicting her in a series of intimate sketches and drawings before beginning increasingly to distort and rearrange her striking physiognomic features in his iconic wartime portraits of her. By the time he painted the present work, Picasso was oscillating between more naturalistic impressions of his raven-haired muse and the overtly stylised, contorted and distorted visions of her. Like a snapshot of her head in motion, perhaps turning towards or away from her lover, here, Dora appears both frontally as well as in profile, her highlighted, almost sculpturally rendered jaw line and chin emphasising this sense of motion. This double profile characterises the greatest of his portraits of Dora, a cubist-inspired stylistic trait that has become inseparable from the artist’s means of capturing his sitters of this period. Interestingly, Dora also experimented with double profiles in her photography and photomontages creating works such as Double Portrait with Hat (circa 1936-37, The Cleveland Museum of Art, Ohio), that capture a single face from different angles simultaneously. Indeed, it was Dora’s photography that initially brought the couple together, with Picasso agreeing during their first meeting to pose for Dora in her apartment. In the early years of their relationship, the couple worked together on a series of photographic experiments, with Dora remembering of this period, ‘We enjoyed ourselves like crazy’ (D. Maar, quoted in ibid., p. 168).

Tête de femme (Dora Maar) was first owned by the legendary patron, collector, and later, designer, Marie Cuttoli, and her partner Henri Laugier. One of Picasso’s great friends of the late 1920s and 30s, Cuttoli, who was one of the leading figures in the revival of modern tapestry weaving, collaborated with him on a number of textile commissions. Over the course of her life she amassed a large collection of works by the leading artists of early Modernism including Braque, Miró, Léger, and of course, Picasso.

更多来自 印象派及现代艺术

查看全部
查看全部