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Lot Essay
An exquisite work on paper that Pablo Picasso drew in January 1921, Femme drapée debout demonstrates the artist’s remarkable ability to switch between artistic idioms. At this time, Picasso was alternating between two seemingly disparate styles: creating geometric, cubist compositions as well as Ingres-esque line drawings and classically inspired figures. With a deft ease, he switched between these styles – both of which dominated the post-war avant-garde of Paris – flaunting his ability at consistently defying expectation and enabling him to maintain his position as one of the foremost leaders of modern art. The present work was included in an important exhibition of the artist held at the Leicester Galleries in London at the beginning of 1921.
Picasso’s Neo-Classicism was inspired by and incorporated a wide variety of cultural and artistic sources. Since the years of the First World War, the artist had been working simultaneously in both a cubist and naturalistic style. During this wartime and post-war period, this look backwards to the art of antiquity and Classicism was prevalent across the European avant-garde. Known as le rappel à l’ordre or the ‘Return to Order,’ a term coined by the poet Jean Cocteau, this cultural movement manifested itself through the increasing appearance of classical themes, motifs and styles. From Antiquity and the Italian Renaissance, to the great French masters, Poussin, David and Ingres, a number of artists mined the past in order to fulfil the overwhelming cultural and ideological need for unity, order, and stability in the face of the unimagined horror and destruction wrought by four years of all-out war. The pre-war avant-garde and its exaltation of abstraction and extreme experimentation was replaced by a new form of measured and restrained modernity that embodied the Latin or ‘classical’ values of stability, harmony, and tradition.
Beginning around 1915 with a series of meticulously detailed, portrait line drawings, over the years that followed, Picasso adopted an astonishing array of classically inspired subjects and styles in an explicit and self-conscious display of artistic virtuosity, invention and, perhaps most importantly, independence. Throughout the winter of 1920-1921, Picasso gradually began to leave portraiture behind and began to elaborate on his exploration of classical styles.
It was at this time that Picasso executed Femme drapée debout. Josep Palau i Fabre has described the conception of the present work, ‘Then one fine day the artist, vivid sanguine in hand, traced out an entirely classical figure [Femme drapée debout], without putting up any resistance or attempting to update it in any way, without employing any subterfuge to disguise this unexpected return to ancient models. And it was thus that a model was born of almost unprecedented naturalness and simplicity. A Picassian miracle. And I say miracle because Picasso himself must have discovered here that he had the ability to draw a classical figure without having to disguise it in any way or without it seeming neoclassical. This was a new-found power, which from now on he would totally assume’ (Picasso: From the Ballets to Drama 1917-1926, London, 2000, p. 259).
It is not only the subject of the present work that is unequivocally classical, but the medium also reflects Picasso’s desire to embrace the art of the past. Using sanguine, a natural red chalk, Picasso was consciously following in the footsteps of the great Renaissance masters including Leonardo da Vinci, Michelangelo and Raphael. Later in the year Picasso returned to this medium when he executed a version of Trois femmes à la fontaine (Zervos, vol. 4, no. 322; The Museum of Modern Art, New York), an important work regarded as the apogee of Picasso’s Neo-Classicism. This composition features a similar standing figure clad in a flowing Grecian-style tunic, with her arm slightly raised and bent at the elbow. Regarded together, the rapid evolution of Picasso’s distinctive classical language over the course of just a few months is clearly demonstrated.
Picasso employed a purposeful plurality as well as parody to create his own form of modern Neo-Classicism. No longer were modernity and tradition two separate entities, but rather, in the art of Picasso, these mutually exclusive tropes were collapsed into a single mode of innovative art making that simultaneously reflected the sentiment of the post-war era, while confounding and disrupting expectation. In its inherent diversity and multivalence of styles, Picasso’s versatility was unmatched by his contemporaries at this time; as Kenneth Silver has written, ‘[Picasso] now appears as a lone artist with multiple personae. This is the Renaissance conception of a solitary, protean, overwhelming genius; Picasso in the 1920s becomes a modern Michelangelo’ (Esprit de Corps: The Art of the Parisian Avant-Garde and the First World War, 1914-1925, London, 1989, p. 316).
Picasso’s Neo-Classicism was inspired by and incorporated a wide variety of cultural and artistic sources. Since the years of the First World War, the artist had been working simultaneously in both a cubist and naturalistic style. During this wartime and post-war period, this look backwards to the art of antiquity and Classicism was prevalent across the European avant-garde. Known as le rappel à l’ordre or the ‘Return to Order,’ a term coined by the poet Jean Cocteau, this cultural movement manifested itself through the increasing appearance of classical themes, motifs and styles. From Antiquity and the Italian Renaissance, to the great French masters, Poussin, David and Ingres, a number of artists mined the past in order to fulfil the overwhelming cultural and ideological need for unity, order, and stability in the face of the unimagined horror and destruction wrought by four years of all-out war. The pre-war avant-garde and its exaltation of abstraction and extreme experimentation was replaced by a new form of measured and restrained modernity that embodied the Latin or ‘classical’ values of stability, harmony, and tradition.
Beginning around 1915 with a series of meticulously detailed, portrait line drawings, over the years that followed, Picasso adopted an astonishing array of classically inspired subjects and styles in an explicit and self-conscious display of artistic virtuosity, invention and, perhaps most importantly, independence. Throughout the winter of 1920-1921, Picasso gradually began to leave portraiture behind and began to elaborate on his exploration of classical styles.
It was at this time that Picasso executed Femme drapée debout. Josep Palau i Fabre has described the conception of the present work, ‘Then one fine day the artist, vivid sanguine in hand, traced out an entirely classical figure [Femme drapée debout], without putting up any resistance or attempting to update it in any way, without employing any subterfuge to disguise this unexpected return to ancient models. And it was thus that a model was born of almost unprecedented naturalness and simplicity. A Picassian miracle. And I say miracle because Picasso himself must have discovered here that he had the ability to draw a classical figure without having to disguise it in any way or without it seeming neoclassical. This was a new-found power, which from now on he would totally assume’ (Picasso: From the Ballets to Drama 1917-1926, London, 2000, p. 259).
It is not only the subject of the present work that is unequivocally classical, but the medium also reflects Picasso’s desire to embrace the art of the past. Using sanguine, a natural red chalk, Picasso was consciously following in the footsteps of the great Renaissance masters including Leonardo da Vinci, Michelangelo and Raphael. Later in the year Picasso returned to this medium when he executed a version of Trois femmes à la fontaine (Zervos, vol. 4, no. 322; The Museum of Modern Art, New York), an important work regarded as the apogee of Picasso’s Neo-Classicism. This composition features a similar standing figure clad in a flowing Grecian-style tunic, with her arm slightly raised and bent at the elbow. Regarded together, the rapid evolution of Picasso’s distinctive classical language over the course of just a few months is clearly demonstrated.
Picasso employed a purposeful plurality as well as parody to create his own form of modern Neo-Classicism. No longer were modernity and tradition two separate entities, but rather, in the art of Picasso, these mutually exclusive tropes were collapsed into a single mode of innovative art making that simultaneously reflected the sentiment of the post-war era, while confounding and disrupting expectation. In its inherent diversity and multivalence of styles, Picasso’s versatility was unmatched by his contemporaries at this time; as Kenneth Silver has written, ‘[Picasso] now appears as a lone artist with multiple personae. This is the Renaissance conception of a solitary, protean, overwhelming genius; Picasso in the 1920s becomes a modern Michelangelo’ (Esprit de Corps: The Art of the Parisian Avant-Garde and the First World War, 1914-1925, London, 1989, p. 316).