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Lot Essay
On 15 June 1932, an extensive survey exhibition dedicated to Pablo Picasso opened at the Galeries Georges Petit in Paris to great fanfare. Across each room in the recently renovated galleries visitors to Picasso: 1901-1932 were treated to an expansive array of works from every stage of the Spanish artist’s career thus far, the eclectic arrangement showcasing the breadth of creativity and ceaseless spirit of invention that marked Picasso’s art. The artist himself had been heavily involved in the planning and realization of the show, arranging loans from his most loyal private collectors and drawing heavily on his own personal archive to secure a final total of 225 paintings, seven sculptures and six illustrated books for display. Similarly, he took charge of the hanging of the works, choosing an arrangement that revealed the recurring leitmotifs, subjects and concerns that had fascinated him endlessly across the years.
In the lead up to the exhibition’s vernissage, however, newspaper reports claimed the artist would skip the opening night in favor of an evening at the movies: “I’ve been hooking these things on the wall for six days now,” Picasso is reported to have said, “and I’ve had enough of them” (quoted in M.C. FitzGerald, Making Modernism: Picasso and the Creation of the Market for Twentieth-Century Art, Berkeley and Los Angeles, 1995, p. 193). The artist escaped Paris shortly afterwards, retreating to his seventeenth-century château, Boisgeloup, in the Normandy countryside. Though just a quick drive from the French capital, this secluded, private property was a refuge for Picasso during the early 1930s, its location reducing the likelihood of unwelcome visitors, prying acquaintances, or admirers paying an unexpected call. Here, he was able to focus on his creative work undisturbed, in the stable he had transformed into a sculpture studio, or the room on the second floor of the corner tower, which had become a dedicated space for painting.
Purchasing a large stock of new canvases, Picasso spent much of the summer of 1932 installed at Boisgeloup, picking up where he had left off in late May as preparations for the grand exhibition had consumed his time and forced him to pause his painterly activities. As with the extraordinary sequence of compositions that had emerged during the opening months of the year, the central figure in Picasso’s art during the summer was Marie-Thérèse Walter, the young woman who had been his lover and muse since 1927. Painted on 31 August 1932, La Lecture (Marie-Thérèse) portrays Marie-Thérèse in a moment of quiet leisure, her attention focused solely on her book, as she appears to lose herself in the story. Imbued with a quiet intimacy and tenderness that stands in stark contrast to the more highly stylized portraits of Marie-Thérèse that had occupied Picasso in recent weeks, this painting records the small, everyday moments the artist and muse enjoyed together in their idyllic, hidden retreat that summer.
Picasso had first met Marie-Thérèse Walter in a chance encounter on the streets of Paris in the early evening of 8 January 1927. Marie-Thérèse, who was exiting the famed Galeries Lafayette department store with her newly purchased col Claudine and matching cuffs for a blouse, remembered catching the artist’s eye in the middle of the crowd. Making his way to her, Picasso promptly introduced himself. “You have an interesting face. I would like to do a portrait of you,” he reportedly told her. “I feel we are going to do great things together… I am Picasso” (quoted in J. Richardson, A Life of Picasso, The Triumphant Years, 1917-1932, New York, 2007, vol. 3, p. 323). In turn, Marie-Thérèse responded with a blank look. “The name Picasso did not mean anything to me. It was his tie that interested me,” she explained. “And then he charmed me” (quoted in P. Cabanne, “Picasso et les joies de la paternité” in L’Oeil, no. 226, May 1974, p. 7).
Picasso was deeply struck by Marie-Thérèse’s statuesque beauty and youthful exuberance, and arranged to meet her again two days later, at the Saint-Lazare metro station. “I went there, just like that, because he had such a pleasant smile,” Marie-Thérèse remembered (quoted D. Widmaier Picasso, “Marie-Thérèse Walter and Pablo Picasso: New Insights into a Secret Love” in Pablo Picasso and Marie-Thérèse Walter: Between Classicism and Surrealism, exh. cat., Graphikmuseum Pablo Picasso, Münster, 2004, p. 29). This legendary encounter came at a pivotal turning point in the artist’s life, as he grew increasingly disillusioned by the haute-bourgeois existence that his wife, the Ukrainian-born ballet dancer Olga Khokhlova, had cultivated for them in Paris. Seeking new inspiration, he had become fascinated by the mythical l’amour fou promoted by André Breton and the Surrealists, a passionate love that would strike suddenly, and consume the beholder. When the tall, blonde, blue-eyed young woman passed him on the street that fateful day, the artist believed he had found such a paramour. The pair soon embarked upon a clandestine affair, centered around furtive meetings and love letters passed in secret.
As Françoise Gilot noted, Walter’s presence left an indelible mark on Picasso’s artistic output during these years, inspiring a vivid new pictorial vocabulary: “I found Marie-Thérèse fascinating to look at. I could see that she was certainly the woman who had inspired Pablo plastically more than any other. She had a very arresting face with a Grecian profile. The whole series of portraits of blonde women Pablo painted between 1927 and 1935 are almost exact replicas of her… she was very athletic, she had that high-color look of glowing good health one often sees in Swedish women. Her forms were handsomely sculptural, with a fullness of volume and a purity of line that gave her body and her face an extraordinary perfection” (F. Gilot and C. Lake, Life with Picasso, New York, 1964, pp. 241-242). As the 1930s dawned, Marie-Thérèse’s likeness appeared increasingly front and center in his works, blossoming forth in all areas of his creative production. Never before had Picasso’s art radiated such passionate, heady eroticism—from delicate drawings, to monumental canvases, to grand plaster sculptures, Marie-Thérèse became the very foundation of every aspect of Picasso’s artistic output.
By the time their relationship entered its sixth, deeply passionate year, Picasso was intimately familiar with Marie-Thérèse’s form. He could recall from memory the way her golden hair fell as it brushed her cheek, the exact profile of the line that ran from her forehead, down her nose to her chin, and the sinuous, flowing topography of her athletic body as she slept. As a result, she became a vehicle for the artist’s most radical painterly experimentations, allowing him to explore themes of transformation and mutation in a myriad of intriguing ways. In 1931, the artist began a series of monumental plaster sculptures, working on carved reliefs and volumetric busts, each devoted to the poised, elegant features of Marie-Thérèse, while the first half of 1932 witnessed a great outpouring of superlative, monumental canvases capturing her form in a myriad of different styles and variations. Ranging from daring, formal reconfigurations of her figure, to richly sensuous visions of her in the role of archetypal reclining nude, these paintings show Picasso at his most inventive. A significant proportion of these works focus on seated portraits of Marie-Thérèse, relaxing in a moment of repose, writing a letter in Buste de femme de profil (Marie-Thérèse) (Zervos, vol. 7, no. 406; Private collection) or caught in a dreamy, sleeping state in the iconic La Rêve (Zervos, vol. 7, no. 364; Private collection) or Le sommeil (Zervos, vol. 7, no. 362; Private collection).
In La Lecture (Marie-Thérèse), Picasso continues this thread of easy leisure, revisiting a subject that had been popular in portraiture since the seventeenth century and which he himself had deployed on numerous occasions for his depictions of the women in his life—that of a female protagonist reading. The first painting the artist completed in 1932 focused on this same subject—in La Lecture (Zervos, vol. 7, no. 358; Musée national Picasso, Paris), painted on 2 January, Marie-Thérèse appears to have been interrupted from her reading, her gaze directed squarely at the artist, her hands resting gently in her lap as she marks her place in the text. By contrast, in La lecture interrompue (9 January 1932, Zervos, vol. 7, no. 363; Private collection) painted a week later, Marie-Thérèse’s head lolls backwards against the headrest of her chair, as if she has is lost in a daydream conjured by the tale, or has drifted-off mid-way through a chapter. In the present work, her focus is trained solely on the book before her—with her chin propped on one hand, and her eyes cast downward, Marie-Thérèse is a study in relaxed focus, the gentle tilt of her head and soft expression suggesting she is oblivious to the artist’s attentions.
Seated before a simple rectangular window—which features in several other works from this year, including Nature morte à la fenêtre (18 January 1932, Zervos, vol. 7, no. 374; Private collection) and Femme assise près d’une fenêtre (Marie-Thérèse) (30 October 1932; Private collection)—Marie-Thérèse’s form appears monumental, Picasso’s treatment of the figure recalling the stylized, volumetric sculptures the artist had created the previous year, inspired by her elegant features. The soft light that spills through the window, meanwhile, illuminates Marie-Thérèse in a play of light and shade, which Picasso indicates by dividing her form into loosely blocked planes of predominantly pastel tones. Traces of charcoal remain visible on the surface of the canvas, interacting with the painted elements in an intriguing interplay that showcases the fluency and spontaneity of Picasso’s technique at this time. Subtle pentimenti reveal the evolution of the image as he worked to capture a likeness swiftly, lines shifting or altering in order to refine certain elements of the figure, as seen in Marie-Thérèse’s right hand. At the same time, there is a bold assuredness to his mark-making, a confidence that allows him to convey her features with a startling economy of means—with a single, short, curving line, for example, he indicates an eye, while a quick horizontal zig-zag at her mouth hints at the sensuality of her lips.
There is a quiet stillness to La Lecture (Marie-Thérèse), a reflection perhaps of Marie-Thérèse’s ongoing presence in the artist’s life at Boisgeloup during this summer, and the simple rhythms of their days together, reading, working, making love, in the secluded surroundings of the chateau. “We would joke and laugh together all day,” Marie-Thérèse later recalled of their time together, “so happy with our secret, living a totally non-bourgeois life, a bohemian love away from those people Picasso knew then...” (quoted in B. Farrell, “Picasso: His Women: The Wonder is that He Found So Much Time to Paint” in Life, 27 December 1968, p. 74). Picasso’s numerous depictions of Marie-Thérèse from these months focus on poses that are captured from the privileged position of a lover, including close-up views of her face as she sleeps, the soft curves of her body as she reclines on a divan, the dreamy expression that takes over her face as she is lost in thought. Here, she appears completely at ease and comfortable in the artist’s presence. Allowed to observe his model uninterrupted, Picasso captures the vivid presence of his beloved model and muse in a peaceful, unremarkable moment of ordinary life.
In an interview with Marie-Thérèse in 1974, Pierre Cabanne asked her what first came to her mind when she heard the name Picasso. Walter answered: “Secrecy. This was because my life with him was always concealed. It was calm and tranquil. We didn’t tell anyone. We were happy like that, and that was enough for us” (quoted in P. Cabanne, op. cit., 1974, p. 7). In many ways, this secrecy came to an abrupt end when visitors entered the Galeries Georges Petit that June to see the artist’s mid-career retrospective, and discovered the great wealth of recent works dedicated to Marie-Thérèse. The repeated appearance of her features from canvas to canvas, room to room, combined with the often erotically charged nature of the works on show, indicated that the artist had found powerful inspiration in his young lover. Though Marie-Thérèse’s identity would remain hidden for a further three decades—her name and long relationship with the artist only revealed when Françoise Gilot published her memoirs in 1964—it was evident to anyone that saw the 1932 exhibition, either in Paris or in its revised format at the Kunsthaus Zurich later that year, that she now occupied the central position within Picasso’s creative vision.
In the lead up to the exhibition’s vernissage, however, newspaper reports claimed the artist would skip the opening night in favor of an evening at the movies: “I’ve been hooking these things on the wall for six days now,” Picasso is reported to have said, “and I’ve had enough of them” (quoted in M.C. FitzGerald, Making Modernism: Picasso and the Creation of the Market for Twentieth-Century Art, Berkeley and Los Angeles, 1995, p. 193). The artist escaped Paris shortly afterwards, retreating to his seventeenth-century château, Boisgeloup, in the Normandy countryside. Though just a quick drive from the French capital, this secluded, private property was a refuge for Picasso during the early 1930s, its location reducing the likelihood of unwelcome visitors, prying acquaintances, or admirers paying an unexpected call. Here, he was able to focus on his creative work undisturbed, in the stable he had transformed into a sculpture studio, or the room on the second floor of the corner tower, which had become a dedicated space for painting.
Purchasing a large stock of new canvases, Picasso spent much of the summer of 1932 installed at Boisgeloup, picking up where he had left off in late May as preparations for the grand exhibition had consumed his time and forced him to pause his painterly activities. As with the extraordinary sequence of compositions that had emerged during the opening months of the year, the central figure in Picasso’s art during the summer was Marie-Thérèse Walter, the young woman who had been his lover and muse since 1927. Painted on 31 August 1932, La Lecture (Marie-Thérèse) portrays Marie-Thérèse in a moment of quiet leisure, her attention focused solely on her book, as she appears to lose herself in the story. Imbued with a quiet intimacy and tenderness that stands in stark contrast to the more highly stylized portraits of Marie-Thérèse that had occupied Picasso in recent weeks, this painting records the small, everyday moments the artist and muse enjoyed together in their idyllic, hidden retreat that summer.
Picasso had first met Marie-Thérèse Walter in a chance encounter on the streets of Paris in the early evening of 8 January 1927. Marie-Thérèse, who was exiting the famed Galeries Lafayette department store with her newly purchased col Claudine and matching cuffs for a blouse, remembered catching the artist’s eye in the middle of the crowd. Making his way to her, Picasso promptly introduced himself. “You have an interesting face. I would like to do a portrait of you,” he reportedly told her. “I feel we are going to do great things together… I am Picasso” (quoted in J. Richardson, A Life of Picasso, The Triumphant Years, 1917-1932, New York, 2007, vol. 3, p. 323). In turn, Marie-Thérèse responded with a blank look. “The name Picasso did not mean anything to me. It was his tie that interested me,” she explained. “And then he charmed me” (quoted in P. Cabanne, “Picasso et les joies de la paternité” in L’Oeil, no. 226, May 1974, p. 7).
Picasso was deeply struck by Marie-Thérèse’s statuesque beauty and youthful exuberance, and arranged to meet her again two days later, at the Saint-Lazare metro station. “I went there, just like that, because he had such a pleasant smile,” Marie-Thérèse remembered (quoted D. Widmaier Picasso, “Marie-Thérèse Walter and Pablo Picasso: New Insights into a Secret Love” in Pablo Picasso and Marie-Thérèse Walter: Between Classicism and Surrealism, exh. cat., Graphikmuseum Pablo Picasso, Münster, 2004, p. 29). This legendary encounter came at a pivotal turning point in the artist’s life, as he grew increasingly disillusioned by the haute-bourgeois existence that his wife, the Ukrainian-born ballet dancer Olga Khokhlova, had cultivated for them in Paris. Seeking new inspiration, he had become fascinated by the mythical l’amour fou promoted by André Breton and the Surrealists, a passionate love that would strike suddenly, and consume the beholder. When the tall, blonde, blue-eyed young woman passed him on the street that fateful day, the artist believed he had found such a paramour. The pair soon embarked upon a clandestine affair, centered around furtive meetings and love letters passed in secret.
As Françoise Gilot noted, Walter’s presence left an indelible mark on Picasso’s artistic output during these years, inspiring a vivid new pictorial vocabulary: “I found Marie-Thérèse fascinating to look at. I could see that she was certainly the woman who had inspired Pablo plastically more than any other. She had a very arresting face with a Grecian profile. The whole series of portraits of blonde women Pablo painted between 1927 and 1935 are almost exact replicas of her… she was very athletic, she had that high-color look of glowing good health one often sees in Swedish women. Her forms were handsomely sculptural, with a fullness of volume and a purity of line that gave her body and her face an extraordinary perfection” (F. Gilot and C. Lake, Life with Picasso, New York, 1964, pp. 241-242). As the 1930s dawned, Marie-Thérèse’s likeness appeared increasingly front and center in his works, blossoming forth in all areas of his creative production. Never before had Picasso’s art radiated such passionate, heady eroticism—from delicate drawings, to monumental canvases, to grand plaster sculptures, Marie-Thérèse became the very foundation of every aspect of Picasso’s artistic output.
By the time their relationship entered its sixth, deeply passionate year, Picasso was intimately familiar with Marie-Thérèse’s form. He could recall from memory the way her golden hair fell as it brushed her cheek, the exact profile of the line that ran from her forehead, down her nose to her chin, and the sinuous, flowing topography of her athletic body as she slept. As a result, she became a vehicle for the artist’s most radical painterly experimentations, allowing him to explore themes of transformation and mutation in a myriad of intriguing ways. In 1931, the artist began a series of monumental plaster sculptures, working on carved reliefs and volumetric busts, each devoted to the poised, elegant features of Marie-Thérèse, while the first half of 1932 witnessed a great outpouring of superlative, monumental canvases capturing her form in a myriad of different styles and variations. Ranging from daring, formal reconfigurations of her figure, to richly sensuous visions of her in the role of archetypal reclining nude, these paintings show Picasso at his most inventive. A significant proportion of these works focus on seated portraits of Marie-Thérèse, relaxing in a moment of repose, writing a letter in Buste de femme de profil (Marie-Thérèse) (Zervos, vol. 7, no. 406; Private collection) or caught in a dreamy, sleeping state in the iconic La Rêve (Zervos, vol. 7, no. 364; Private collection) or Le sommeil (Zervos, vol. 7, no. 362; Private collection).
In La Lecture (Marie-Thérèse), Picasso continues this thread of easy leisure, revisiting a subject that had been popular in portraiture since the seventeenth century and which he himself had deployed on numerous occasions for his depictions of the women in his life—that of a female protagonist reading. The first painting the artist completed in 1932 focused on this same subject—in La Lecture (Zervos, vol. 7, no. 358; Musée national Picasso, Paris), painted on 2 January, Marie-Thérèse appears to have been interrupted from her reading, her gaze directed squarely at the artist, her hands resting gently in her lap as she marks her place in the text. By contrast, in La lecture interrompue (9 January 1932, Zervos, vol. 7, no. 363; Private collection) painted a week later, Marie-Thérèse’s head lolls backwards against the headrest of her chair, as if she has is lost in a daydream conjured by the tale, or has drifted-off mid-way through a chapter. In the present work, her focus is trained solely on the book before her—with her chin propped on one hand, and her eyes cast downward, Marie-Thérèse is a study in relaxed focus, the gentle tilt of her head and soft expression suggesting she is oblivious to the artist’s attentions.
Seated before a simple rectangular window—which features in several other works from this year, including Nature morte à la fenêtre (18 January 1932, Zervos, vol. 7, no. 374; Private collection) and Femme assise près d’une fenêtre (Marie-Thérèse) (30 October 1932; Private collection)—Marie-Thérèse’s form appears monumental, Picasso’s treatment of the figure recalling the stylized, volumetric sculptures the artist had created the previous year, inspired by her elegant features. The soft light that spills through the window, meanwhile, illuminates Marie-Thérèse in a play of light and shade, which Picasso indicates by dividing her form into loosely blocked planes of predominantly pastel tones. Traces of charcoal remain visible on the surface of the canvas, interacting with the painted elements in an intriguing interplay that showcases the fluency and spontaneity of Picasso’s technique at this time. Subtle pentimenti reveal the evolution of the image as he worked to capture a likeness swiftly, lines shifting or altering in order to refine certain elements of the figure, as seen in Marie-Thérèse’s right hand. At the same time, there is a bold assuredness to his mark-making, a confidence that allows him to convey her features with a startling economy of means—with a single, short, curving line, for example, he indicates an eye, while a quick horizontal zig-zag at her mouth hints at the sensuality of her lips.
There is a quiet stillness to La Lecture (Marie-Thérèse), a reflection perhaps of Marie-Thérèse’s ongoing presence in the artist’s life at Boisgeloup during this summer, and the simple rhythms of their days together, reading, working, making love, in the secluded surroundings of the chateau. “We would joke and laugh together all day,” Marie-Thérèse later recalled of their time together, “so happy with our secret, living a totally non-bourgeois life, a bohemian love away from those people Picasso knew then...” (quoted in B. Farrell, “Picasso: His Women: The Wonder is that He Found So Much Time to Paint” in Life, 27 December 1968, p. 74). Picasso’s numerous depictions of Marie-Thérèse from these months focus on poses that are captured from the privileged position of a lover, including close-up views of her face as she sleeps, the soft curves of her body as she reclines on a divan, the dreamy expression that takes over her face as she is lost in thought. Here, she appears completely at ease and comfortable in the artist’s presence. Allowed to observe his model uninterrupted, Picasso captures the vivid presence of his beloved model and muse in a peaceful, unremarkable moment of ordinary life.
In an interview with Marie-Thérèse in 1974, Pierre Cabanne asked her what first came to her mind when she heard the name Picasso. Walter answered: “Secrecy. This was because my life with him was always concealed. It was calm and tranquil. We didn’t tell anyone. We were happy like that, and that was enough for us” (quoted in P. Cabanne, op. cit., 1974, p. 7). In many ways, this secrecy came to an abrupt end when visitors entered the Galeries Georges Petit that June to see the artist’s mid-career retrospective, and discovered the great wealth of recent works dedicated to Marie-Thérèse. The repeated appearance of her features from canvas to canvas, room to room, combined with the often erotically charged nature of the works on show, indicated that the artist had found powerful inspiration in his young lover. Though Marie-Thérèse’s identity would remain hidden for a further three decades—her name and long relationship with the artist only revealed when Françoise Gilot published her memoirs in 1964—it was evident to anyone that saw the 1932 exhibition, either in Paris or in its revised format at the Kunsthaus Zurich later that year, that she now occupied the central position within Picasso’s creative vision.