.jpg?w=1)
.jpg?w=1)
.jpg?w=1)
.jpg?w=1)
Lot Essay
"I paint the way some people write their autobiography." - Pablo Picasso
“When Picasso bought La Californie,” Roland Penrose wrote, “though he had seen it only by twilight, he realized that its most precious asset to him, in addition to its nearness to Vallauris, was the light that penetrates into every corner of the house. He was happy at once in the luminous atmosphere of the lofty rooms, and as he had done before, he began to paint pictures inspired by the objects that lay around and the tall windows with their art nouveau tracery, through which a yellow-green is filtered by the branches of the palm trees. Day after day he saw his studio anew” (Picasso: His Life and Work, London, 1958, p. 358).
Painted on 28 October 1955, L’Atelier offers a glimpse into the private world of Pablo Picasso. Known by the artist as his paysages d’intérieur, these studio scenes of the mid-1950s are deeply personal depictions of the then world-famous artist’s new home and studio, La Californie, a large villa set on the hills above Cannes in the south of France. “‘N’est-ce pas, c’est beau?’ Picasso is apt to say of his studio,” John Richardson wrote, “and this is basically what these paintings convey” (“Picasso’s Ateliers and Other Recent Works,” in The Burlington Magazine, vol. 99, no. 651, 1957, p. 186).
In the present painting, Picasso has pictured a corner of his studio, looking out through the ornate French windows to the lush palm trees beyond. The ephemera of the space fills the interior: his painted ceramic Tête de femme (1953, Musée national Picasso, Paris) stands atop a pedestal, positioned opposite an elaborate wrought iron light. Together, line and pattern create a compelling composition, the fronds of the palm tree echoing the forms of the window frame. This was the fifth of twelve depictions of this studio view that Picasso made throughout October and November of this year, around the occasion of his 74th birthday on 25 October, and is one of the most richly worked and detailed of this series (Zervos, vol. 16, nos. 486-497). Other examples of this series are now housed in museums collections including the Tate, London, and the Musée national d'art moderne de la Ville de Paris, Centre Georges Pompidou, Paris.
“Unlike Braque’s esoteric evocations of interior space, in which nothing is ever quite what it seems,” Richardson described, “or Matisse’s carefully arranged studio scenes which are almost always a pretext for pyrotechnic display of color and decoration, Picasso’s paintings of the subject show us what his surroundings look like, what he feels about them, and what he can transform them into if necessary. Indeed, so persuasive are they in these respects that we actually feel transformed to the center of his private world—a center which, it is important to remember, Picasso believes to be the focal point of the whole artistic universe” (ibid.).
Picasso had moved to La Californie in the summer of 1955. A grand nineteenth-century Art Nouveau villa, he was immediately captivated by the flamboyance and grandeur of the building. Composed of airy, high ceilinged rooms with large, elegantly ornamented windows that looked out onto palm-filled gardens planted, the spacious ground floor served as a studio, living and dining room, and storage area for the artist and his lover of the time and future second wife, Jacqueline Roque. Never before had Picasso had such a large space with which to fill a lifetime of his art, and soon, the rooms became piled not only with his work, but papers, possessions, costumes, trinkets, and ceramics, a living library of treasures that the artist had amassed over the course of his life.
"For Picasso, his studio is a self-portrait in itself. Sensitive to its ritual, its secret poetry, he marks with his presence the environment and the objects in it, and makes his territory into his own ‘second skin’." - Marie-Laure Bernadac
While offering a view into the inner sanctum of his studio and home, L’Atelier and the paysages d’intérieur series also pay homage to Picasso’s great rival and friend, Henri Matisse. Matisse had passed away the year prior, in November 1954. His death greatly affected the artist and so, much as he had done throughout his life, Picasso expressed his grief through his art. Like the monumental Femmes d’Alger series which stand as a poignant tribute to the great French master, so Picasso’s studio scenes are an artistic response to Matisse’s own earlier series of interiors painted at his home in Vence in the late 1940s, including Nature morte aux grenades (Musée Matisse, Nice) and Intérieur avec rideau Egyptien (The Phillips Collection, Washington, D.C.). These great, late paintings—the last major group of works Matisse made before moving to his cut outs—were a triumphant combination of color, spontaneous line, and pattern.
L’Atelier presents the same deft array of compositional elements, exuding an exoticism and decorativeness that is immediately reminiscent of Matisse’s earlier interior scenes. As John Golding has written, “The La Californie studio paintings are amongst the most overtly Matissean works that Picasso ever produced… Picasso appears to be attempting to create an environment, a spirit to which Matisse would have responded… The windows, the palm trees and foliage beyond, read like Matissean quotes” (Matisse Picasso, exh. cat., Tate, London, 2002, p. 299).
L’Atelier was included along with the rest of the series in the exhibition Picasso: Peintures, 1955-1956, held at the Galerie Louise Leiris, Paris in the spring of 1957. It was subsequently acquired by the legendary cubist scholar and collector, Douglas Cooper. Beginning in the early 1930s, Cooper amassed what would become one of the greatest and largest collections of Cubism ever assembled. He focused primarily on those he believed to be the progenitors of “true” or “essential” Cubism: Picasso, Georges Braque, Juan Gris, and Fernand Léger. In 1949, he moved into the large Château de Castille in Argilliers, near Avignon, where, together with his then partner, the artist’s biographer, John Richardson, he frequently hosted a range of leading cultural figures of post-war France and beyond, including Picasso, Braque, Léger, Nicolas de Staël, Jean Cocteau, Michel Leiris, and many more.
In October 1974, Cooper’s home was burgled while he slept upstairs, with twenty-seven works from his collection, including Picassos, and a few artworks by Braque and Gris, stolen. The art works’ frames were found strewn in a bordering vineyard. With no fingerprints or traces of evidence, the crime was described by one of the policeman who attended the scene as “a work of art” (quoted in A. Clark and R. Calvocoressi, Irascible: The Combative Life of Douglas Cooper: Collector and Friend of Picasso, New Haven and London, 2025, p. 259). Soon after, Cooper decided that he could no longer stay in the château.
In 1977, Cooper moved to a luxury apartment at the Monte Carlo Star in Monaco, for which his companion and sole adopted son Billy McCarty-Cooper designed the elegant interior which would accommodate not only the collection but the scholar’s vast and important library as well. Cooper lived out the rest of his life there. Though there were a number of unproven theories and conspiracies as to the reason for and nature of the theft, the thieves were later caught and sent to prison (ibid., p. 260).
Despite this, many of the stolen works have never been recovered. Following Cooper’s death in 1984, McCarty-Cooper spent many years searching for these stolen masterpieces. One other of Cooper’s works is known to have been recovered, Le pot au chocolat (Zervos, vol. 2a, no. 131), which was sold by McCarty-Cooper to Leonard Lauder in 1986, and now resides in The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York.
McCarty-Cooper’s respect for Cooper’s extraordinary contribution as a scholar and collector is evidenced in his efforts, after Cooper’s death, to document and exhibit his collection. He actively supported major exhibitions of the collection which were organized in Basel, London, and Philadelphia and then in Houston and Los Angeles; a catalogue and history of the collection by Dr. Dorothy Kosinski, curator, The Douglas Cooper Collection; and an oral history project documenting the major figures in Cooper’s world. Cooper’s papers and art reference library were lodged at the Getty Study Center for the History of Art and the Humanities (now the Getty Research Institute) in Los Angeles, California. Objects from the collection were frequently made available for exhibitions in the United States and Europe.
L’Atelier was later sold by Perls Galleries, New York to Davlyn Gallery, New York in 1986. From there, it was acquired by Takashimaya, a department store in Osaka, Japan, where it was bought by a private collector, and kept in the family collection for over thirty years. The painting was subsequently bequeathed to the current holder in 2025.
“When Picasso bought La Californie,” Roland Penrose wrote, “though he had seen it only by twilight, he realized that its most precious asset to him, in addition to its nearness to Vallauris, was the light that penetrates into every corner of the house. He was happy at once in the luminous atmosphere of the lofty rooms, and as he had done before, he began to paint pictures inspired by the objects that lay around and the tall windows with their art nouveau tracery, through which a yellow-green is filtered by the branches of the palm trees. Day after day he saw his studio anew” (Picasso: His Life and Work, London, 1958, p. 358).
Painted on 28 October 1955, L’Atelier offers a glimpse into the private world of Pablo Picasso. Known by the artist as his paysages d’intérieur, these studio scenes of the mid-1950s are deeply personal depictions of the then world-famous artist’s new home and studio, La Californie, a large villa set on the hills above Cannes in the south of France. “‘N’est-ce pas, c’est beau?’ Picasso is apt to say of his studio,” John Richardson wrote, “and this is basically what these paintings convey” (“Picasso’s Ateliers and Other Recent Works,” in The Burlington Magazine, vol. 99, no. 651, 1957, p. 186).
In the present painting, Picasso has pictured a corner of his studio, looking out through the ornate French windows to the lush palm trees beyond. The ephemera of the space fills the interior: his painted ceramic Tête de femme (1953, Musée national Picasso, Paris) stands atop a pedestal, positioned opposite an elaborate wrought iron light. Together, line and pattern create a compelling composition, the fronds of the palm tree echoing the forms of the window frame. This was the fifth of twelve depictions of this studio view that Picasso made throughout October and November of this year, around the occasion of his 74th birthday on 25 October, and is one of the most richly worked and detailed of this series (Zervos, vol. 16, nos. 486-497). Other examples of this series are now housed in museums collections including the Tate, London, and the Musée national d'art moderne de la Ville de Paris, Centre Georges Pompidou, Paris.
“Unlike Braque’s esoteric evocations of interior space, in which nothing is ever quite what it seems,” Richardson described, “or Matisse’s carefully arranged studio scenes which are almost always a pretext for pyrotechnic display of color and decoration, Picasso’s paintings of the subject show us what his surroundings look like, what he feels about them, and what he can transform them into if necessary. Indeed, so persuasive are they in these respects that we actually feel transformed to the center of his private world—a center which, it is important to remember, Picasso believes to be the focal point of the whole artistic universe” (ibid.).
Picasso had moved to La Californie in the summer of 1955. A grand nineteenth-century Art Nouveau villa, he was immediately captivated by the flamboyance and grandeur of the building. Composed of airy, high ceilinged rooms with large, elegantly ornamented windows that looked out onto palm-filled gardens planted, the spacious ground floor served as a studio, living and dining room, and storage area for the artist and his lover of the time and future second wife, Jacqueline Roque. Never before had Picasso had such a large space with which to fill a lifetime of his art, and soon, the rooms became piled not only with his work, but papers, possessions, costumes, trinkets, and ceramics, a living library of treasures that the artist had amassed over the course of his life.
"For Picasso, his studio is a self-portrait in itself. Sensitive to its ritual, its secret poetry, he marks with his presence the environment and the objects in it, and makes his territory into his own ‘second skin’." - Marie-Laure Bernadac
While offering a view into the inner sanctum of his studio and home, L’Atelier and the paysages d’intérieur series also pay homage to Picasso’s great rival and friend, Henri Matisse. Matisse had passed away the year prior, in November 1954. His death greatly affected the artist and so, much as he had done throughout his life, Picasso expressed his grief through his art. Like the monumental Femmes d’Alger series which stand as a poignant tribute to the great French master, so Picasso’s studio scenes are an artistic response to Matisse’s own earlier series of interiors painted at his home in Vence in the late 1940s, including Nature morte aux grenades (Musée Matisse, Nice) and Intérieur avec rideau Egyptien (The Phillips Collection, Washington, D.C.). These great, late paintings—the last major group of works Matisse made before moving to his cut outs—were a triumphant combination of color, spontaneous line, and pattern.
L’Atelier presents the same deft array of compositional elements, exuding an exoticism and decorativeness that is immediately reminiscent of Matisse’s earlier interior scenes. As John Golding has written, “The La Californie studio paintings are amongst the most overtly Matissean works that Picasso ever produced… Picasso appears to be attempting to create an environment, a spirit to which Matisse would have responded… The windows, the palm trees and foliage beyond, read like Matissean quotes” (Matisse Picasso, exh. cat., Tate, London, 2002, p. 299).
L’Atelier was included along with the rest of the series in the exhibition Picasso: Peintures, 1955-1956, held at the Galerie Louise Leiris, Paris in the spring of 1957. It was subsequently acquired by the legendary cubist scholar and collector, Douglas Cooper. Beginning in the early 1930s, Cooper amassed what would become one of the greatest and largest collections of Cubism ever assembled. He focused primarily on those he believed to be the progenitors of “true” or “essential” Cubism: Picasso, Georges Braque, Juan Gris, and Fernand Léger. In 1949, he moved into the large Château de Castille in Argilliers, near Avignon, where, together with his then partner, the artist’s biographer, John Richardson, he frequently hosted a range of leading cultural figures of post-war France and beyond, including Picasso, Braque, Léger, Nicolas de Staël, Jean Cocteau, Michel Leiris, and many more.
In October 1974, Cooper’s home was burgled while he slept upstairs, with twenty-seven works from his collection, including Picassos, and a few artworks by Braque and Gris, stolen. The art works’ frames were found strewn in a bordering vineyard. With no fingerprints or traces of evidence, the crime was described by one of the policeman who attended the scene as “a work of art” (quoted in A. Clark and R. Calvocoressi, Irascible: The Combative Life of Douglas Cooper: Collector and Friend of Picasso, New Haven and London, 2025, p. 259). Soon after, Cooper decided that he could no longer stay in the château.
In 1977, Cooper moved to a luxury apartment at the Monte Carlo Star in Monaco, for which his companion and sole adopted son Billy McCarty-Cooper designed the elegant interior which would accommodate not only the collection but the scholar’s vast and important library as well. Cooper lived out the rest of his life there. Though there were a number of unproven theories and conspiracies as to the reason for and nature of the theft, the thieves were later caught and sent to prison (ibid., p. 260).
Despite this, many of the stolen works have never been recovered. Following Cooper’s death in 1984, McCarty-Cooper spent many years searching for these stolen masterpieces. One other of Cooper’s works is known to have been recovered, Le pot au chocolat (Zervos, vol. 2a, no. 131), which was sold by McCarty-Cooper to Leonard Lauder in 1986, and now resides in The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York.
McCarty-Cooper’s respect for Cooper’s extraordinary contribution as a scholar and collector is evidenced in his efforts, after Cooper’s death, to document and exhibit his collection. He actively supported major exhibitions of the collection which were organized in Basel, London, and Philadelphia and then in Houston and Los Angeles; a catalogue and history of the collection by Dr. Dorothy Kosinski, curator, The Douglas Cooper Collection; and an oral history project documenting the major figures in Cooper’s world. Cooper’s papers and art reference library were lodged at the Getty Study Center for the History of Art and the Humanities (now the Getty Research Institute) in Los Angeles, California. Objects from the collection were frequently made available for exhibitions in the United States and Europe.
L’Atelier was later sold by Perls Galleries, New York to Davlyn Gallery, New York in 1986. From there, it was acquired by Takashimaya, a department store in Osaka, Japan, where it was bought by a private collector, and kept in the family collection for over thirty years. The painting was subsequently bequeathed to the current holder in 2025.