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拍品專文
Executed in the months following Pablo Picasso’s relocation to Paris in 1904, Le Couple (Les Misérables) is an evocative rendering of two seated figures intertwined at a table. Shrouded in charcoal shadows, the couple lean against each other, their forms coalescing in the soft lines of pigment. A poetic feeling of unity emanates from their adjoined forms, amplified in the analogous positioning of their elongated right arms. Yet, the left figure’s haunting stare, as he gazes away from his partner, intensifies the poignancy of the composition.
Le Couple dates to Picasso’s late Blue Period, throughout which the artist had recurrently depicted melancholic scenes, pre-occupied with themes of isolation, poverty, and despondency. The motif of the couple sitting together at a table was one that he had treated with particular prominence, and Le Couple relates closely to an oil painting of the same name, also from 1904 (Zervos, vol. 1, no. 224; Werner and Gabriele Merzbacher Collection, on permanent loan to the Kunsthaus Zurich). The subject also featured in his etching Le repas frugal, the artist’s largest and best-known Blue Period print and the definitive iteration of this subject (see lot 336 in this sale).
Picasso had moved to Paris in April 1904 from Barcelona, determined to establish a foothold for himself in the French capital, and Le Couple elucidates the aesthetic shift in style that followed this geographical transition. While the same tragic themes of poverty and loneliness had permeated his recent output in Barcelona, in Paris his figures became lithe and wraith-like, their elongated limbs emphasised by the figures’ skeletal, waifish appearance. Their angular, architectonic postures perhaps prefigure the artist’s later development of Cubism, though they are also redolent of the Mannerist style, as seen in the corpus of El Greco, whose works had captivated Picasso since he first saw them in the Prado in Madrid in 1897. Le Couple was acquired by the influential collecting duo Leo and Gertrude Stein, and the work remained with Gertrude throughout her life.
Le Couple dates to Picasso’s late Blue Period, throughout which the artist had recurrently depicted melancholic scenes, pre-occupied with themes of isolation, poverty, and despondency. The motif of the couple sitting together at a table was one that he had treated with particular prominence, and Le Couple relates closely to an oil painting of the same name, also from 1904 (Zervos, vol. 1, no. 224; Werner and Gabriele Merzbacher Collection, on permanent loan to the Kunsthaus Zurich). The subject also featured in his etching Le repas frugal, the artist’s largest and best-known Blue Period print and the definitive iteration of this subject (see lot 336 in this sale).
Picasso had moved to Paris in April 1904 from Barcelona, determined to establish a foothold for himself in the French capital, and Le Couple elucidates the aesthetic shift in style that followed this geographical transition. While the same tragic themes of poverty and loneliness had permeated his recent output in Barcelona, in Paris his figures became lithe and wraith-like, their elongated limbs emphasised by the figures’ skeletal, waifish appearance. Their angular, architectonic postures perhaps prefigure the artist’s later development of Cubism, though they are also redolent of the Mannerist style, as seen in the corpus of El Greco, whose works had captivated Picasso since he first saw them in the Prado in Madrid in 1897. Le Couple was acquired by the influential collecting duo Leo and Gertrude Stein, and the work remained with Gertrude throughout her life.