Sylvette

Sylvette is one of a landmark series of around sixty paintings, drawings and sculptures that Picasso made in the spring and summer of 1954, depicting a twenty-year-old blonde woman named Sylvette David. With her long, Brigitte Bardot-esque ponytail worn high on her head – a fashionable style of the time – elegant neck, and refined profile, Sylvette is among the most recognisable of the many women who feature prominently in Picasso’s oeuvre – as well as one of the few with whom the artist was not romantically involved. Her presence in the artist’s life incited an extraordinary body of work. Working directly from life – a process the artist rarely practiced – he painted her time and time again, in a variety of styles and idioms, almost always picturing her in profile. This serial form of portraiture stands as one of the most extensive group of works in Picasso’s oeuvre that was not devoted to lovers or his family.

Picasso met Sylvette and her fiancé, Tobias Jellinek, an English furniture designer, in Vallauris. Jellinek had a workshop in the Quartier de Fournas, where Picasso also had a studio. He had noticed Sylvette walking past his window, and intrigued by her profile, invited the couple to his home, La Galloise. ‘It was amazing!’ Sylvette recalled of their first meeting with the artist. ‘He was lovely. He put us at ease right away… We sat under a lime tree, Toby and I’ (quoted in Sylvette, Sylvette, Sylvette: Picasso and the Model, exh. cat., Kunsthalle Bremen, 2014, pp. 118-119).

The couple gave Picasso one of Jellinek’s chairs as a gift. Constructed with an iron framework filled out by rope and felt, with two round balls at the end of the arms, the chair was so impractical for sitting that it delighted Picasso, reminding him of a group of paintings that he had made in the 1930s of Dora Maar seated in a similarly skeletal fauteuil. He subsequently ordered three more chairs from Sylvette and her fiancé – as a result of which, Françoise Gilot recalled, ‘La Galloise was bulging with chairs that were amusing to look at but took up a disproportionate amount of room in view of the fact that no one could sit in them with any pleasure’ (Life with Picasso, New York, 1964, p. 352).

 According to Sylvette, some weeks after they had met, she began to model for Picasso. She recalled, ‘It was March, nice sunshine, and we drank and smoked, drank coffee, not alcohol, and smoked cigarettes, which I learned in England, terrible. So Picasso saw us there and came over the wall with this paper, or was it a little canvas, with a very simple image of a girl with a ponytail. We realised that it was me and off we went to see him. He opened the door and he was so happy… He embraced me; he was so happy to see me: “I want to paint you, paint Sylvette!”’ (quoted in exh. cat., op. cit., p. 119).

Over the course of the following months, the artist completed an expansive series of oil paintings and drawings of the young blonde (Zervos vol. 16, nos. 274-294, 306-315). The works predominantly show Sylvette in full to three-quarter profile, highlighting her youthful silhouette. However, they employ an unusually wide stylistic range, from graceful naturalism to geometric abstraction. Most are painted, like the present work, in monochrome, as if Picasso found the forms and features of Sylvette so absorbing, he had no need for colour. 

Sylvette is one of the most abstract of the group. Here, Picasso has worked in a grisaille palette to convey the essential forms of the seated Sylvette. Her distinctive hair style, which highlights her long neck, and elegant poise are all conveyed with an impressive economy of means, as if Picasso was testing the limits of representation within the genre of portraiture. Her clasped hands, characteristic coat, which had been made by her fiancé, Jellenik, and the high back wicker chair provide a striking contrast to her visage.

The present painting is a dramatic distillation of some of the defining features of the series. In the more naturalistic portraits painted in a three quarter profile, a shadow falls over part of Sylvette’s face and part of her neck, emphasising her elegant features. Taken as a whole, the painting balances a depersonalised, abstracted approach to the model that is simultaneously highly focused on her defining physiognomy. This experimental style was the result of Picasso’s iterative, almost obsessive quest to capture Sylvette’s likeness.

Portraiture serves as one of the essential modes of artistic exploration in Picasso’s art. He obsessively portrayed his lovers and those closest to him. In comparison to Picasso’s other female portraits of the early 1950s, which predominantly featured his lover of that time, Gilot, the Sylvette series provides an interesting contrast. As Klaus Gallwitz writes, ‘The [Sylvette] portraits concentrate so single-mindedly on the youthful head that the individual features become subsidiary to the type into which Picasso condensed them. What makes the Sylvette portraits remarkable is that through Picasso’s paintings, this young girl came to typify a whole generation. Young people recognised themselves in these portraits when they saw them in exhibitions or reproductions. The ponytail (which was not an invention of Picasso’s) and Sylvette's high carriage of the head became fashionable styles à la Picasso. For the first time since the war one of Picasso’s portraits had become the idol of a rising generation’ (Picasso at 90: The Late Work, New York, 1971, p. 90).

The portraits of Sylvette were painted prior to the very first paintings that Picasso made of Jacqueline Roque, the last great love of his life. By this time, Picasso’s relationship with Gilot had broken down beyond repair; she had left the artist and returned to Paris with their children in the autumn of 1953. Jacqueline, whom the artist had met at the Madoura pottery studio, made her entry into Picasso’s work in June 1954, in a pair of large canvases that carry over the elongated neck, profile format, and overall elegance of the Sylvette series (Zervos, vol. 16, no. 324-325). Pierre Daix has written, ‘It suddenly seems as if all the refinement and figurative enrichment elaborated during the Sylvette sequence had been arrived at specifically for this new model, with something fresh in the organization of space around her’ (Picasso: Life and Art, London, 1993, p. 319). Indeed, when asked why Picasso stopped painting her, Sylvette replied simply, ‘He met Jacqueline Roque and he painted her’ (quoted in exh. cat., op. cit., p. 121). As such, Sylvette and the rest of this remarkable series stand as a kind of artistic caesura in the artist’s work, as he moved from his depictions of Gilot and their young children, to instead focus primarily on Jacqueline, the woman who would reign supreme over Picasso’s art for the rest of his life.