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拍品专文
“When I went to the old Trocadéro,” Pablo Picasso recalled of his 1907 visit, “I was all alone. I wanted to get away. But I didn’t leave. I stayed. I stayed. I understood that it was very important: something was happening to me, right? The masks weren’t just like other pieces of sculpture. Not at all. They were magic things… [these] pieces were intercesseurs, mediators… Les demoiselles d’Avignon must have come to me that very day, but not at all because of the forms; because it was my first exorcism painting—yes absolutely!” (quoted in J. Richardson, A Life of Picasso, The Painter of Modern Life, 1907-1917, London, 2009, vol. II, p. 24).
Picasso’s fateful visit to Paris’s Musée d’Ethnographie du Trocadéro in the spring of 1907 changed the course of his career. At this time he was in the midst of the monumental canvas he had been working on since the start of this year, Les demoiselles d’Avignon (Zervos, vol. 2*, no. 18; The Museum of Modern Art, New York). Picasso had first conceived and developed all five of the nudes in the archaic, Iberian-inspired idiom that he had forged the year prior. Yet, when exposed to the trove of African and Oceanic objects that the Trocadéro housed, Picasso invented a new pictorial style. He reworked the two right hand figures of the painting, rendering their faces as strikingly powerful, striated mask-like visages. As a result, the composition is a hybrid of styles, with dissimilar Iberian and tribal forms squaring off against each other to create a jarring, dissonant effect.
Tête de femme was painted in the midst of this revelatory moment in the artist’s work. Pierre Daix and Jean Rosselet situate this painting as one of a group that is directly related to the revision of the first state of the Demoiselles (Picasso: The Cubist Years, 1907-1916, London, 1979, p. 196). In this group of heads, many of which now reside in museums including The Barnes Foundation, Philadelphia, and the Centre Pompidou, Paris, Picasso honed in on the depiction of the face from various angles, frontally, from the side, or as in the present work, from above, breaking down and reconsidering the physiognomic elements. Most notable however in this group is the emergence of Picasso’s newly-conceived hatching technique, with the artist using striated lines of paint to create the appearance of volume. The same large, all-seeing eyes that defined his work of the end of 1906 and beginning of the year are exaggerated, dominating the evermore stylized and abstracted visages of these figures. In this work, the nose appears as if carved from stone, a triangular appendage on the figure’s face, which gave rise to the painting being called Femme au nez en quart de Brie, a playful description given by the work’s first owner, the Surrealist poet, Paul Eluard, from whom it was acquired by René Gaffé, and then Roland Penrose.
Though Picasso had likely been exposed to African and Oceanic objects prior to his visit to the Trocadéro, possibly for example, in the studio of Henri Matisse, whom he had recently met, the aesthetic and, most importantly, the psychological resonance of these works did not feed into his art until this point. In the Trocadéro, Picasso would have been confronted with a vast array of these works, comprehending the magic, talismanic, or ritualistic purposes with which many of these objects were invested. “No doubt Picasso read some of the lapidary phrases regarding practical function on the labels of the objects,” William Rubin has explained. “Among those we know to have been visible in 1907 were ‘Cures the insane,’ ‘Cures ailments caused by the deceased,’ and ‘Protects against the sorcerer’” (quoted in “The Genesis of ‘Les demoiselles d’Avignon’” in Les demoiselles d’Avignon, New York, 1994, p. 16). These works, with their stylized forms, which bore no relation to Western forms of human representation, spoke to Picasso’s inner psyche. “And it arrives [in Picasso’s work] suddenly, in part as a solution to the search for plastic correlatives to express feelings about sexuality and fate with which Picasso had wanted to invest the Demoiselles from the beginning, and which he obviously felt to be beyond the expressive capabilities of the Iberian-Grecoesque figuration of the early state,” Rubin has written (ibid., p. 104).
These artworks triggered a formal change in Picasso’s artistic direction. Freed from the conventions of representation, Picasso embraced a more conceptual mode of conveying the human form. This seminal shift paved the way for the development of Cubism that would gather pace over the following months. Regarded in this context, Tête de femme stands at a pivotal moment in Picasso’s work, as he broke with the past to forge an entirely new way of painting.
Tête de femme has a particularly fascinating provenance, having been in the collection of some of the most important names in twentieth-century art. Gaffé amassed one of the greatest collections of modern art in the years before the Second World War. In 1937, believing he had an illness from which he would never recover, he sold his collection, much of which was acquired by the British Surrealist artist and writer, Penrose, and subsequently the Belgian artist and writer, E.L.T. Mesens. This painting would later cross the Atlantic to Mexico when it was bought by another Surrealist artist, Gordon Onslow Ford.
Picasso’s fateful visit to Paris’s Musée d’Ethnographie du Trocadéro in the spring of 1907 changed the course of his career. At this time he was in the midst of the monumental canvas he had been working on since the start of this year, Les demoiselles d’Avignon (Zervos, vol. 2*, no. 18; The Museum of Modern Art, New York). Picasso had first conceived and developed all five of the nudes in the archaic, Iberian-inspired idiom that he had forged the year prior. Yet, when exposed to the trove of African and Oceanic objects that the Trocadéro housed, Picasso invented a new pictorial style. He reworked the two right hand figures of the painting, rendering their faces as strikingly powerful, striated mask-like visages. As a result, the composition is a hybrid of styles, with dissimilar Iberian and tribal forms squaring off against each other to create a jarring, dissonant effect.
Tête de femme was painted in the midst of this revelatory moment in the artist’s work. Pierre Daix and Jean Rosselet situate this painting as one of a group that is directly related to the revision of the first state of the Demoiselles (Picasso: The Cubist Years, 1907-1916, London, 1979, p. 196). In this group of heads, many of which now reside in museums including The Barnes Foundation, Philadelphia, and the Centre Pompidou, Paris, Picasso honed in on the depiction of the face from various angles, frontally, from the side, or as in the present work, from above, breaking down and reconsidering the physiognomic elements. Most notable however in this group is the emergence of Picasso’s newly-conceived hatching technique, with the artist using striated lines of paint to create the appearance of volume. The same large, all-seeing eyes that defined his work of the end of 1906 and beginning of the year are exaggerated, dominating the evermore stylized and abstracted visages of these figures. In this work, the nose appears as if carved from stone, a triangular appendage on the figure’s face, which gave rise to the painting being called Femme au nez en quart de Brie, a playful description given by the work’s first owner, the Surrealist poet, Paul Eluard, from whom it was acquired by René Gaffé, and then Roland Penrose.
Though Picasso had likely been exposed to African and Oceanic objects prior to his visit to the Trocadéro, possibly for example, in the studio of Henri Matisse, whom he had recently met, the aesthetic and, most importantly, the psychological resonance of these works did not feed into his art until this point. In the Trocadéro, Picasso would have been confronted with a vast array of these works, comprehending the magic, talismanic, or ritualistic purposes with which many of these objects were invested. “No doubt Picasso read some of the lapidary phrases regarding practical function on the labels of the objects,” William Rubin has explained. “Among those we know to have been visible in 1907 were ‘Cures the insane,’ ‘Cures ailments caused by the deceased,’ and ‘Protects against the sorcerer’” (quoted in “The Genesis of ‘Les demoiselles d’Avignon’” in Les demoiselles d’Avignon, New York, 1994, p. 16). These works, with their stylized forms, which bore no relation to Western forms of human representation, spoke to Picasso’s inner psyche. “And it arrives [in Picasso’s work] suddenly, in part as a solution to the search for plastic correlatives to express feelings about sexuality and fate with which Picasso had wanted to invest the Demoiselles from the beginning, and which he obviously felt to be beyond the expressive capabilities of the Iberian-Grecoesque figuration of the early state,” Rubin has written (ibid., p. 104).
These artworks triggered a formal change in Picasso’s artistic direction. Freed from the conventions of representation, Picasso embraced a more conceptual mode of conveying the human form. This seminal shift paved the way for the development of Cubism that would gather pace over the following months. Regarded in this context, Tête de femme stands at a pivotal moment in Picasso’s work, as he broke with the past to forge an entirely new way of painting.
Tête de femme has a particularly fascinating provenance, having been in the collection of some of the most important names in twentieth-century art. Gaffé amassed one of the greatest collections of modern art in the years before the Second World War. In 1937, believing he had an illness from which he would never recover, he sold his collection, much of which was acquired by the British Surrealist artist and writer, Penrose, and subsequently the Belgian artist and writer, E.L.T. Mesens. This painting would later cross the Atlantic to Mexico when it was bought by another Surrealist artist, Gordon Onslow Ford.
