Mère et enfant

Pablo Picasso spent the summer of 1922 with his wife, Olga Khokhlova, and their infant son Paul in Dinard, a fashionable seaside resort at the mouth of the river Rance, popular due to its relative proximity to Paris. The summer proved immensely fruitful for the artist, who produced more than sixty oil paintings and nearly two hundred drawings between June and September, ranging from tender portraits of his small family, to landscape sketches and Cubist still lifes. Perhaps the most evocative of this group of works are a series of classicized female figures, both ethereal and monumental, which recall the idealized features of Quattrocento Madonnas or sculptural Hellenistic goddesses. Their coiffures are parted in the middle and gently waved, redolent of antique statuary, with sharp brows and heavy lidded eyes that appeared as though carved from stone. Mère et enfant, painted at the height of that contented summer, demonstrates the manner in which these figures are both gracious and enigmatic—like sculptures come to quiet, contemplative life. The present work exemplifies Picasso’s incomparable ability to distill and synthesize a wealth of pictorial and thematic possibilities in his work, as he quarried from the art of the past in the years following the First World War, to reach an innovative artistic idiom fully his own.
Picasso’s initial first-hand encounter with the Mediterranean’s art historical heritage coincided with his meeting and courting of Olga, a Ukrainian-born ballerina then at the apex of her career with the Ballets Russes. The two had both traveled to Rome in February 1917 to prepare and rehearse Serge Diaghilev’s premiere production of the ballet Parade. While designing the stage sets and costumes for the show, and in the company of his friends, the writer Jean Cocteau and the choreographer Léonide Massine, Picasso sojourned to Naples to view the excavated remains of ancient Pompeii. Massine later recalled: “Picasso was thrilled by the majestic ruins, and climbed endlessly over broken columns to stand staring at fragments of Roman statuary” (quoted in J. Clair, ed., Picasso, 1917-1924: The Italian Journey, exh. cat., Palazzo Grassi, Venice, 1998, pp. 79-80).
Picasso examined the surviving artworks on display at the Museo Archeologico Nazionale in Naples, where he likely saw the Farnese Juno—now thought to be the goddess Diana, a Roman copy after a Greek sculpture carved in the fifth century BCE. The sculpture became the source of many regal female figures Picasso depicted in subsequent years, often fused with Olga’s delicate features across numerous pages and canvases. The artist also seized the opportunity to study examples of ancient fresco paintings: a photograph taken by Cocteau shows Picasso pointing to a mural of Bacchus and Silenus. Evidently struck by what he saw, he brought home postcards of this and other Pompeiian wall paintings, now housed at the Musée Picasso in Paris. The muted, terracotta palette of the present work might suggest the earthy tones of ancient fresco techniques. Before returning to Paris, Picasso also visited Florence, where he admired the masterpieces at the Gallerie degli Uffizi’s iconic Sala dei Primitivi, including paintings by Raphael and sculptures by Michelangelo.
Shortly before embarking on his voyage to Italy in 1917, Picasso traversed two distinct stylistic avenues, moving effortlessly between a late synthetic Cubist manner and a more naturalistic, classically modulated mode of figuration which Olga would come to embody in his oeuvre. While champions of each approach strove to discredit his efforts in the other, the seemingly contrasting notions of Cubism and Classicism appeared to Picasso to be dual sides of the same coin—the culmination of Western art in its most provocative, modern form, ever generating potent dialects of representation from which dazzlingly transformative ideas could burst forth. Picasso had produced classicized drawings as early as 1914, and following the 1918 Armistice, his ongoing exploration of Classicism as a means of expanding the parameters of contemporary art gained new impetus. Now, the European avant-garde to which he belonged embraced an ethos of renewal linked to a heightened awareness of and reverence for tradition. Adhering to le rappel à l’ordre—the “call to order,” as coined by Cocteau—artists increasingly rejected modern conventions in favor of looking to the past, from classical antiquity to the Italian Renaissance to the great French masters of the previous centuries, notably Nicolas Poussin, Jacques-Louis David, and Jean Auguste Dominique Ingres. In the eyes of these artistic circles, the humanistic cultural imperative of these periods could heal the wounds that four years of gruesome carnage had inflicted on the modern world, thus satisfying a yearning for veritable rebirth into a period of unity, stability, and harmony.
Picasso and Olga married in July 1918, after having postponed the nuptials from May due to an injury that briefly debilitated Olga. The newlyweds took an apartment in the trendy rue la Boétie, which had become the center of the Parisian art trade, allowing them to enter a new stage in their lives—Picasso as a celebrated member of the beau mode, and Olga in her role as a celebrity’s wife. In February 1921, they welcomed their only child together, a son named Paulo Joseph. Not long after, Picasso began to explore intimate and tender depictions of his new family. Until that point, Olga had often been transformed into a Greco-Roman goddess in her husband’s art—her features exaggerated volumetrically to mythological proportions, or depicted as a divinely beautiful Italian Madonna, or a Spanish matron in a lace mantilla. Now, aspects of each were consolidated to capture the poignancy of the maternity scenes in which the new mother becomes a timeless model of ennobled feminine grace.
In Mère et enfant, Olga gazes at her young son as he sits serenely in her lap, an impenetrable look on her refined features, captured in a striking monochrome palette. Her head is bowed in silent contemplation, as though caught in a moment of reverie, appearing as venerated and impregnable as any classical deity or Renaissance Virgin. Rather than displaying an exacting likeness, the work is an affectionate idealization, showcasing the subtle power of expression that Picasso summoned through the urbane style of portraiture his wife inspired. Olga’s features are subtly distorted, the space between her eyes widened and her lips minimized. Picasso must have used an exceptionally fine brush in his treatment of the two figures, creating the impression that the work was executed in ink on aged paper rather than painted in oils on canvas. While clearly evoking the various sources that so inspired Picasso at this juncture of his career, the work defies exact identification with any specific antique or classical example.