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Lot Essay
Executed in July 1932, Pablo Picasso’s exquisitely drafted Sculpteur avec buste de jeune fille sur une sellette offers rich insight into the legendary artist’s work at a critical point in his career. The present work is drawn onto the frontispiece of an exhibition catalogue for the seminal 1932 Picasso retrospective at Galerie Georges Petit- the first and only exhibition which the artist personally installed. Held in Paris between 12 June and 30 July that year, the exhibition not only cemented Picasso’s reputation as an unparalleled leader of the European avant-garde, it allowed the public and the artist himself to reflect on and evaluate thirty years of singular innovation. The drawing depicts one of the most vaunted yet intimate subjects in Picasso’s corpus - an artist in the very act of creation, an autobiographical subject that he would continue to explore throughout the remainder of his career.
In Sculpteur avec buste de jeune fille sur une sellette, Picasso utilizes a fluid, economical line to masterfully construct his subjects and grant them a sense of affecting immediacy. The long, continuous line of the bust’s visage (an unmistakable homage to Picasso’s muse Marie-Thérèse Walter) contrasts with the variegated, short curling strokes that coalesce into the bearded head of the seated sculptor. Both figures are articulated in the spartan, classicizing manner typical of the artist’s graphic output of this period. The male figure is captured in the act of creation, his right hand modeling the bust’s shoulder, recalling the myth of Pygmalion and Galatea.
One of Picasso’s most groundbreaking inventions was his reimagining of the relationship between drawing and sculpture, an innovation carefully conveyed in the present work. As Olivier Berggruen aptly observes, for Picasso, ‘drawing could hint at sculpture, just as sculpture could be imbued with painterly or linear qualities’ (‘Pablo Picasso: The Line and the World,’ in Picasso: Seven Decades of Drawing, exh. cat., Acquavella, New York, 2021, p. 13). Picasso created numerous sculptures in the late 1920s into the early 1930s, treating the practice as drawing in the third dimension. The artist sculpted an important series of busts in 1931 depicting Marie-Thérèse Walter, and the present work captures the essence of this series, exploring the relationship between literal and virtual modes of representation.
Picasso inscribed the present sheet with the dedication ‘Pour Monsieur Georges Manoury Paris Juillet 1932,’ and the catalogue edition on which he executed the drawing was printed especially for Manoury, a noted Parisian art world figure. The retrospective at Georges Petit was a watershed moment for Picasso, uniting for the first time three decades of his artwork in the same space. The exhibition was also notable for being the first public exposure of his portraits and sculptures of Marie-Thérèse, the young model whose arresting features immediately captivated Picasso when he spotted her on a Parisian street in 1927. The present work captures Picasso dwelling on his creation of the many sculpted portraits he made of Marie-Thérèse, while simultaneously looking forward to new possibilities inspired by his most important muse.
In Sculpteur avec buste de jeune fille sur une sellette, Picasso utilizes a fluid, economical line to masterfully construct his subjects and grant them a sense of affecting immediacy. The long, continuous line of the bust’s visage (an unmistakable homage to Picasso’s muse Marie-Thérèse Walter) contrasts with the variegated, short curling strokes that coalesce into the bearded head of the seated sculptor. Both figures are articulated in the spartan, classicizing manner typical of the artist’s graphic output of this period. The male figure is captured in the act of creation, his right hand modeling the bust’s shoulder, recalling the myth of Pygmalion and Galatea.
One of Picasso’s most groundbreaking inventions was his reimagining of the relationship between drawing and sculpture, an innovation carefully conveyed in the present work. As Olivier Berggruen aptly observes, for Picasso, ‘drawing could hint at sculpture, just as sculpture could be imbued with painterly or linear qualities’ (‘Pablo Picasso: The Line and the World,’ in Picasso: Seven Decades of Drawing, exh. cat., Acquavella, New York, 2021, p. 13). Picasso created numerous sculptures in the late 1920s into the early 1930s, treating the practice as drawing in the third dimension. The artist sculpted an important series of busts in 1931 depicting Marie-Thérèse Walter, and the present work captures the essence of this series, exploring the relationship between literal and virtual modes of representation.
Picasso inscribed the present sheet with the dedication ‘Pour Monsieur Georges Manoury Paris Juillet 1932,’ and the catalogue edition on which he executed the drawing was printed especially for Manoury, a noted Parisian art world figure. The retrospective at Georges Petit was a watershed moment for Picasso, uniting for the first time three decades of his artwork in the same space. The exhibition was also notable for being the first public exposure of his portraits and sculptures of Marie-Thérèse, the young model whose arresting features immediately captivated Picasso when he spotted her on a Parisian street in 1927. The present work captures Picasso dwelling on his creation of the many sculpted portraits he made of Marie-Thérèse, while simultaneously looking forward to new possibilities inspired by his most important muse.