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Lot Essay
Chevalier, pages et moine is part of a cycle of work Pablo Picasso created during the early months of 1951 devoted to the figure of the knight. Wearing elaborate armour and an outlandish standard that dangles from his helmet, the gallant knight sits astride his faithful steed, shown draped in a decorative caparison. The knight’s body is entirely obscured by the components of his metal covering save for his hands, which clutch the reins and a heraldic shield. Surrounding him are two pages, steadfast and resolute, and a monk, whose face and clothing have been skilfully rendered in simple line. Velvety tonalities in the background contrast with the elegant geometric patterning that adorns the horse’s flank. Swooping lines define the armour’s design while softer brushwork makes up the pages’ hair and clothing. In deploying these and other mark-making techniques, Picasso demonstrated his enjoyment in fashioning this scene.
Chevalier, pages et moine was created one day before Picasso completed a related oil painting, Jeux de pages, now in the collection of the Musée Picasso in Paris. In the present work, the three figures gather around the knight as if to ready him for battle. Jeux de pages appears to continue this narrative as the position of the page on the lefthand side has shifted ever so slightly so that he appears to now be guiding the horse forward.
Within his oeuvre, Picasso’s medieval characters seem to have appeared almost out of nowhere. Save for a few sketches, these were not figures he had previously depicted. At the time, the artist was working on his monumental painting Massacre en Corée (Zervos, vol. 15, no. 173; Musée Picasso, Paris), which was developed in response to the conflict on the Korean peninsula that had begun the year prior. The painting explicitly references Francisco Goya’s El tres de Mayo de 1808, 1815, and Edouard Manet’s L’exécution de l’empereur Maximilien, painted in 1868, and its overt critique pleased few. Despite his relatively apolitical aesthetic, Picasso was deeply preoccupied by the threat of violence in the wake of the Second World War. Chevalier, pages et moine relocates this criticism to the Middle Ages. The resulting imagery is satirical and uses the elaborate, almost farcical armour as a subtle comment on military aggression.
When the dealer Daniel-Henry Kahnweiler came to visit Picasso in Vallauris, where the artist was living during this period, he was shown images of the knights. According to art historian Pierre Caban, Kahnweiler saw a connection between these works and the then-untitled Massacre en Corée as well as to a recent comic strip of Ivanhoe that had been in printed in the newspaper, L’Humanité. Kahnweiler watched as Picasso made a lithograph of a knight and a page, describing it as ‘very Pinturricchio-ish’, a reference to the Italian Renaissance painter (quoted in P. Caban, Pablo Picasso: His Life and Times, New York, 1977, p. 422). Picasso probably considered several antecedents before beginning his knights, including, perhaps, Quattrocento frescos, Flemish paintings, and medieval tales.
Picasso would go on to reincarnate the knight several years later in the guise of the hidalgo, the Spanish figure who populated his Mousquetaire series. He later reflected on the idea of visual narrative, and they way his characters at times suggested their own actions, in terms that relate to Chevalier, pages et moine and the adventures of this errant knight: ‘Of course, one never knows what's going to come out, but as soon as the drawing gets underway, a story or an idea is born. And that's it. Then the story grows, like theatre or life and the drawing is turned into other drawings, a real novel. It's great fun, believe me. At least, I enjoy myself to no end inventing these stories, and I spend hour after hour while I draw, observing my creatures and thinking about the mad things they're up to. Basically, it's my way of writing fiction’ (Picasso, quoted in R. Otero, Forever Picasso: An Intimate Look at His Last Years, New York, 1974, p. 170).
Chevalier, pages et moine was created one day before Picasso completed a related oil painting, Jeux de pages, now in the collection of the Musée Picasso in Paris. In the present work, the three figures gather around the knight as if to ready him for battle. Jeux de pages appears to continue this narrative as the position of the page on the lefthand side has shifted ever so slightly so that he appears to now be guiding the horse forward.
Within his oeuvre, Picasso’s medieval characters seem to have appeared almost out of nowhere. Save for a few sketches, these were not figures he had previously depicted. At the time, the artist was working on his monumental painting Massacre en Corée (Zervos, vol. 15, no. 173; Musée Picasso, Paris), which was developed in response to the conflict on the Korean peninsula that had begun the year prior. The painting explicitly references Francisco Goya’s El tres de Mayo de 1808, 1815, and Edouard Manet’s L’exécution de l’empereur Maximilien, painted in 1868, and its overt critique pleased few. Despite his relatively apolitical aesthetic, Picasso was deeply preoccupied by the threat of violence in the wake of the Second World War. Chevalier, pages et moine relocates this criticism to the Middle Ages. The resulting imagery is satirical and uses the elaborate, almost farcical armour as a subtle comment on military aggression.
When the dealer Daniel-Henry Kahnweiler came to visit Picasso in Vallauris, where the artist was living during this period, he was shown images of the knights. According to art historian Pierre Caban, Kahnweiler saw a connection between these works and the then-untitled Massacre en Corée as well as to a recent comic strip of Ivanhoe that had been in printed in the newspaper, L’Humanité. Kahnweiler watched as Picasso made a lithograph of a knight and a page, describing it as ‘very Pinturricchio-ish’, a reference to the Italian Renaissance painter (quoted in P. Caban, Pablo Picasso: His Life and Times, New York, 1977, p. 422). Picasso probably considered several antecedents before beginning his knights, including, perhaps, Quattrocento frescos, Flemish paintings, and medieval tales.
Picasso would go on to reincarnate the knight several years later in the guise of the hidalgo, the Spanish figure who populated his Mousquetaire series. He later reflected on the idea of visual narrative, and they way his characters at times suggested their own actions, in terms that relate to Chevalier, pages et moine and the adventures of this errant knight: ‘Of course, one never knows what's going to come out, but as soon as the drawing gets underway, a story or an idea is born. And that's it. Then the story grows, like theatre or life and the drawing is turned into other drawings, a real novel. It's great fun, believe me. At least, I enjoy myself to no end inventing these stories, and I spend hour after hour while I draw, observing my creatures and thinking about the mad things they're up to. Basically, it's my way of writing fiction’ (Picasso, quoted in R. Otero, Forever Picasso: An Intimate Look at His Last Years, New York, 1974, p. 170).