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拍品專文
Conceived in 1950, La femme enceinte, 1er état marks the beginning of Pablo Picasso’s great sculptural resurgence in the post-war years. Among the first major sculptures that Picasso made in his new studio in Vallauris, his home in the south of France, this is one of the artist’s first assemblages of this period, works in which he combined modeling with found objects, including wicker baskets, toy cars, palm fronds, and more. Inspired by his lover, Françoise Gilot, who had recently given birth to the couple’s second child, Paloma, Picasso used ceramic bowls and pitchers to create the rounded forms of the figure’s breasts and torso. This period became one of the most prolific moments of sculptural experimentation in the artist’s career, as he continued to break through conventional boundaries of the medium to create radical works that are highly distinctive, playful, and personal.
Picasso, Gilot, and their young son, Claude, had moved to Vallauris in 1948. There, the artist bought a small, pink-walled house, known as La Galloise. At this time, Picasso was immersed in the production of ceramics, having discovered the Madoura pottery studio nearby two summers prior. Now living in the south full-time, Picasso sought a studio of his own for both his painting and sculpture. He soon found a derelict former perfume factory, known as Le Fournas, situated about a hundred yards from the Madoura studio on the rue du Fournas. He and Gilot set about transforming its ramshackle workshops into two large studios, one for painting, the other, for sculpture, with plenty of storage space for his ceramics. Having spent the war years cooped up in his Paris apartment, Picasso found his capacious new studio liberating. Inspired, and with his own space once more, in the autumn of 1949, he turned to sculpture.
On his walk from La Galloise to Le Fournas, Picasso passed a field that served as a dumping ground for local potters and craftsmen. Filled with broken ceramics and pots, pieces of wood, scrap metal, and other discarded detritus, this rubbish heap set Picasso’s scavenging instincts alight. “Often, on his way to work, Pablo would stop by the dump to see what might have been added since his last inspection,” Gilot recalled. “He searched the dump daily and before he even got there, he rummaged around in any rubbish barrels we passed on our walk to the studio. I walked along with him, pushing an old baby carriage into which he threw whatever likely looking pieces of junk he found on the way. Or if it was something too big to fit into the carriage, he would send a car around for it afterward” (Life with Picasso, New York, 1964, pp. 317-318).
These found objects sparked Picasso’s imagination, as he began to create a series of assemblage sculptures in which these broken, often mundane pieces were transformed, reassigned with different roles. “Picasso was already king of the rag-and-bone men,” Jean Cocteau reminisced, “and continued to be in Vallauris, picking up whatever caught his eye in the street and raising it to the dignity of purpose. He’s an Orpheus. He charms objects, and the objects he charms, he takes them wherever he wishes” (quoted in A. Coliva and D. Widmaier-Picasso, eds., Picasso: The Sculpture, exh. cat., Galleria Borghese, Rome, 2018, p. 36).
La femme enceinte was one of the first sculptures that Picasso made in his new studio. Here, he used a selection of ceramic vessels—two jars and a vase—to serve as the pregnant woman’s breasts and belly, the naturally undulating, curving forms of these objects acting as the perfect stand-in for these elements of the woman’s rounded body. “The breasts and distended abdomen were made with the help of three water pitchers: the belly from the portion of a large one, and the breasts from two small ones, all picked up from the scrap heap. The rest was modeled,” Gilot later recalled (op. cit., 1964, p. 320).
A series of photographs taken in Picasso’s studio in May 1950 shows the development of the work. Initially, Picasso constructed a metal armature, to which he attached the variously sized ceramic objects on the figure’s torso. He also used a broken piece of ceramic to form the back of the figure’s head down to her shoulder. Using planks of wood as the arms, Picasso then covered the work with plaster, creating a marked contrast between the smooth ceramic surfaces of the breasts and distended torso, the vital, life-giving elements of the woman’s body, and the more highly textured, modeled areas of the rest of the figure.
This plaster version, now in The Museum of Modern Art, New York, presided over Picasso’s studio for the following months, before it was later cast in bronze in an edition of three, including the present work, by the Valsuani foundry in Paris. One of the trio is now in the Hirshhorn Museum, Washington, D.C., and the other is now in a private collection. Some time after, Picasso returned to this figure, creating a second state which was made in solid plaster from the casting of the first version. For this later version, which was cast in an edition of two, Picasso added further details, including nipples and a naval, as well as defining the feet and adding to the base (Spies no. 350). These two casts now reside in the Nasher Sculpture Center, Dallas, and the Musée national Picasso, Paris.
Picasso clearly relished the metaphorical connection between the forms of the quotidian vessels and those of the female body. He had been exploring these visual equivalences in his ceramics of the previous years, using the undulating form of a vase as the basis for a depiction of a woman, dissolving the divisions of painting, sculpture, and ceramics. Gilot described how she once asked Picasso why he incorporated found objects into his sculpture, rather than simply modeling the forms he wished to create with plaster. “There’s a good reason for doing it this way,” he responded, “the material itself, the form and texture of those pieces, often gives me the key to the whole sculpture… Aside from that, it’s not that I need that ready-made element, but I achieve reality through the use of metaphor. My sculptures are plastic metaphors… I’m out to fool the mind rather than the eye” (quoted in ibid., pp. 321-322).
At the time that he created La femme enceinte, Picasso was trying to persuade Gilot to have a third child. “I didn’t want to,” Gilot later wrote in her biography, “because I was still feeling very weakened even though a year had passed since Paloma was born. I think [La femme enceinte] was a form of wish fulfillment on his part. He worked over it a long time, I suppose from a composite mental image he had of the way I had looked while I was carrying Claude and Paloma” (ibid., p. 320). Regarded in this way, La femme enceinte takes on a very personal resonance for the artist, a vision of his beloved partner and the mother of his two children, whose form he would have witnessed constantly changing and evolving through both of her pregnancies. Given that the couple did not go on to have a third child, this work stands as a poignant testament to this formative time in both Picasso and Gilot’s lives, as the artist—and father—memorialized this moment in bronze.
Roland Penrose, who visited the artist in Vallauris while the plaster version of the sculpture remained in his studio, noted this devotional, reverential aspect of the work and wrote, “In the figure of La femme enceinte… [Picasso’s] preoccupation is different. In this case it is the swollen forms to which he draws attention by polishing the bare bronze surfaces of breasts and belly as though they have been caressed by devotees like those who polish St. Peter’s toes with their kisses. This figure standing stark and proud of her fruitfulness is one of Picasso’s most human and most moving achievements. At the present time he keeps a plaster cast high on a table, presiding over the corner of his studio where he is most often at work” (Picasso: His Life and Work, London, 1958, p. 342).
The year prior, in 1949, Picasso had created a very different, abstracted, and totemic-like female figure, also titled Femme enceinte (Spies, no. 347), which was directly inspired by Gilot’s pregnancy with Paloma. In contrast to the present work, in the earlier piece, Picasso simplified and reduced the female form to a pair of arms, breasts, and rounded orb-shape stomach, connected by a thin central rod, which was initially a leafless palm frond that he had picked up in Vallauris. When he returned to this theme with La femme enceinte, Picasso simultaneously invested it with a more personal meaning, as well as creating a figure who appears timeless, her pregnant form standing as a universal symbol of motherhood. Standing frontally, with a hieratic, stable pose, the figure resembles a Greek korai, yet in her pregnant state she appears as if she is an ancient fertility or mother goddess from a past epoch.
At around the same time that he created La femme enceinte, Picasso made two other important assemblage works which follow the theme of motherhood and children, La femme à la poussette (Spies, no. 407) and Petite fille sautant à la corde (Spies, no. 408). In the latter, Picasso achieved his desire to make a sculpture that does not touch the ground, creating this idyllic image of childhood with an array of found objects including a basket for her torso and a chocolate box for her face. Indeed, the artist’s interest in these subjects was a direct reflection of the sense of happy, domestic contentment that he was experiencing in his life at this time. In love with Gilot and a new father once more, he was fascinated by the world of his young children, elevating these themes to the center of his work in these post-war years.
La femme enceinte was acquired in 1956 from the Galerie Louise Leiris for The Museum of Modern Art, New York with funds gifted by Louise Reinhardt Smith. The then-director of MoMA, René d’Harnoncourt used to stay with Smith and her husband at their farm in the Berkshires, where they owned a prized herd of advance-registered Guernsey cows. After the death of her husband, Smith turned to art as a salve for her grief, enlisting her friend, d’Harnoncourt, who introduced her to two pivotal figures of the New York museum world of the time, James Thrall Soby and Alferd H. Barr. “I already knew how to look,” she said, “but they taught me how to see” (quoted in Masterworks from the Louise Reinhardt Smith Collection, exh. cat., The Museum of Modern Art, New York, 1995, p. 9). She sought out bold works by the leading modern masters, many of which she intended from the start to gift to MoMA. Picasso was one of her favorite artists. Barr called her and asked her if she would consider buying La femme enceinte for the museum, instead of Picasso’s early and important cubist sculpture, Le verre d’absinthe (Zervos, vol. 2b, no. 584). She recalled, “‘But Alfred,’ I objected, ‘the Museum has to have Le verre d’absinthe. It’s the first cubist sculpture Picasso ever made. The Museum must have both...’ He asked nervously if I would send a telegram to confirm my promise. So I dispatched a wire saying ‘Seldom in the history of modern art has a glass of absinthe led so directly to a pregnant woman’” (ibid., p. 9).
Picasso, Gilot, and their young son, Claude, had moved to Vallauris in 1948. There, the artist bought a small, pink-walled house, known as La Galloise. At this time, Picasso was immersed in the production of ceramics, having discovered the Madoura pottery studio nearby two summers prior. Now living in the south full-time, Picasso sought a studio of his own for both his painting and sculpture. He soon found a derelict former perfume factory, known as Le Fournas, situated about a hundred yards from the Madoura studio on the rue du Fournas. He and Gilot set about transforming its ramshackle workshops into two large studios, one for painting, the other, for sculpture, with plenty of storage space for his ceramics. Having spent the war years cooped up in his Paris apartment, Picasso found his capacious new studio liberating. Inspired, and with his own space once more, in the autumn of 1949, he turned to sculpture.
On his walk from La Galloise to Le Fournas, Picasso passed a field that served as a dumping ground for local potters and craftsmen. Filled with broken ceramics and pots, pieces of wood, scrap metal, and other discarded detritus, this rubbish heap set Picasso’s scavenging instincts alight. “Often, on his way to work, Pablo would stop by the dump to see what might have been added since his last inspection,” Gilot recalled. “He searched the dump daily and before he even got there, he rummaged around in any rubbish barrels we passed on our walk to the studio. I walked along with him, pushing an old baby carriage into which he threw whatever likely looking pieces of junk he found on the way. Or if it was something too big to fit into the carriage, he would send a car around for it afterward” (Life with Picasso, New York, 1964, pp. 317-318).
These found objects sparked Picasso’s imagination, as he began to create a series of assemblage sculptures in which these broken, often mundane pieces were transformed, reassigned with different roles. “Picasso was already king of the rag-and-bone men,” Jean Cocteau reminisced, “and continued to be in Vallauris, picking up whatever caught his eye in the street and raising it to the dignity of purpose. He’s an Orpheus. He charms objects, and the objects he charms, he takes them wherever he wishes” (quoted in A. Coliva and D. Widmaier-Picasso, eds., Picasso: The Sculpture, exh. cat., Galleria Borghese, Rome, 2018, p. 36).
La femme enceinte was one of the first sculptures that Picasso made in his new studio. Here, he used a selection of ceramic vessels—two jars and a vase—to serve as the pregnant woman’s breasts and belly, the naturally undulating, curving forms of these objects acting as the perfect stand-in for these elements of the woman’s rounded body. “The breasts and distended abdomen were made with the help of three water pitchers: the belly from the portion of a large one, and the breasts from two small ones, all picked up from the scrap heap. The rest was modeled,” Gilot later recalled (op. cit., 1964, p. 320).
A series of photographs taken in Picasso’s studio in May 1950 shows the development of the work. Initially, Picasso constructed a metal armature, to which he attached the variously sized ceramic objects on the figure’s torso. He also used a broken piece of ceramic to form the back of the figure’s head down to her shoulder. Using planks of wood as the arms, Picasso then covered the work with plaster, creating a marked contrast between the smooth ceramic surfaces of the breasts and distended torso, the vital, life-giving elements of the woman’s body, and the more highly textured, modeled areas of the rest of the figure.
This plaster version, now in The Museum of Modern Art, New York, presided over Picasso’s studio for the following months, before it was later cast in bronze in an edition of three, including the present work, by the Valsuani foundry in Paris. One of the trio is now in the Hirshhorn Museum, Washington, D.C., and the other is now in a private collection. Some time after, Picasso returned to this figure, creating a second state which was made in solid plaster from the casting of the first version. For this later version, which was cast in an edition of two, Picasso added further details, including nipples and a naval, as well as defining the feet and adding to the base (Spies no. 350). These two casts now reside in the Nasher Sculpture Center, Dallas, and the Musée national Picasso, Paris.
Picasso clearly relished the metaphorical connection between the forms of the quotidian vessels and those of the female body. He had been exploring these visual equivalences in his ceramics of the previous years, using the undulating form of a vase as the basis for a depiction of a woman, dissolving the divisions of painting, sculpture, and ceramics. Gilot described how she once asked Picasso why he incorporated found objects into his sculpture, rather than simply modeling the forms he wished to create with plaster. “There’s a good reason for doing it this way,” he responded, “the material itself, the form and texture of those pieces, often gives me the key to the whole sculpture… Aside from that, it’s not that I need that ready-made element, but I achieve reality through the use of metaphor. My sculptures are plastic metaphors… I’m out to fool the mind rather than the eye” (quoted in ibid., pp. 321-322).
At the time that he created La femme enceinte, Picasso was trying to persuade Gilot to have a third child. “I didn’t want to,” Gilot later wrote in her biography, “because I was still feeling very weakened even though a year had passed since Paloma was born. I think [La femme enceinte] was a form of wish fulfillment on his part. He worked over it a long time, I suppose from a composite mental image he had of the way I had looked while I was carrying Claude and Paloma” (ibid., p. 320). Regarded in this way, La femme enceinte takes on a very personal resonance for the artist, a vision of his beloved partner and the mother of his two children, whose form he would have witnessed constantly changing and evolving through both of her pregnancies. Given that the couple did not go on to have a third child, this work stands as a poignant testament to this formative time in both Picasso and Gilot’s lives, as the artist—and father—memorialized this moment in bronze.
Roland Penrose, who visited the artist in Vallauris while the plaster version of the sculpture remained in his studio, noted this devotional, reverential aspect of the work and wrote, “In the figure of La femme enceinte… [Picasso’s] preoccupation is different. In this case it is the swollen forms to which he draws attention by polishing the bare bronze surfaces of breasts and belly as though they have been caressed by devotees like those who polish St. Peter’s toes with their kisses. This figure standing stark and proud of her fruitfulness is one of Picasso’s most human and most moving achievements. At the present time he keeps a plaster cast high on a table, presiding over the corner of his studio where he is most often at work” (Picasso: His Life and Work, London, 1958, p. 342).
The year prior, in 1949, Picasso had created a very different, abstracted, and totemic-like female figure, also titled Femme enceinte (Spies, no. 347), which was directly inspired by Gilot’s pregnancy with Paloma. In contrast to the present work, in the earlier piece, Picasso simplified and reduced the female form to a pair of arms, breasts, and rounded orb-shape stomach, connected by a thin central rod, which was initially a leafless palm frond that he had picked up in Vallauris. When he returned to this theme with La femme enceinte, Picasso simultaneously invested it with a more personal meaning, as well as creating a figure who appears timeless, her pregnant form standing as a universal symbol of motherhood. Standing frontally, with a hieratic, stable pose, the figure resembles a Greek korai, yet in her pregnant state she appears as if she is an ancient fertility or mother goddess from a past epoch.
At around the same time that he created La femme enceinte, Picasso made two other important assemblage works which follow the theme of motherhood and children, La femme à la poussette (Spies, no. 407) and Petite fille sautant à la corde (Spies, no. 408). In the latter, Picasso achieved his desire to make a sculpture that does not touch the ground, creating this idyllic image of childhood with an array of found objects including a basket for her torso and a chocolate box for her face. Indeed, the artist’s interest in these subjects was a direct reflection of the sense of happy, domestic contentment that he was experiencing in his life at this time. In love with Gilot and a new father once more, he was fascinated by the world of his young children, elevating these themes to the center of his work in these post-war years.
La femme enceinte was acquired in 1956 from the Galerie Louise Leiris for The Museum of Modern Art, New York with funds gifted by Louise Reinhardt Smith. The then-director of MoMA, René d’Harnoncourt used to stay with Smith and her husband at their farm in the Berkshires, where they owned a prized herd of advance-registered Guernsey cows. After the death of her husband, Smith turned to art as a salve for her grief, enlisting her friend, d’Harnoncourt, who introduced her to two pivotal figures of the New York museum world of the time, James Thrall Soby and Alferd H. Barr. “I already knew how to look,” she said, “but they taught me how to see” (quoted in Masterworks from the Louise Reinhardt Smith Collection, exh. cat., The Museum of Modern Art, New York, 1995, p. 9). She sought out bold works by the leading modern masters, many of which she intended from the start to gift to MoMA. Picasso was one of her favorite artists. Barr called her and asked her if she would consider buying La femme enceinte for the museum, instead of Picasso’s early and important cubist sculpture, Le verre d’absinthe (Zervos, vol. 2b, no. 584). She recalled, “‘But Alfred,’ I objected, ‘the Museum has to have Le verre d’absinthe. It’s the first cubist sculpture Picasso ever made. The Museum must have both...’ He asked nervously if I would send a telegram to confirm my promise. So I dispatched a wire saying ‘Seldom in the history of modern art has a glass of absinthe led so directly to a pregnant woman’” (ibid., p. 9).
