Pablo Picasso

Between 1926 and 1929 Picasso worked intensively on the theme of the model in the studio. But did he actually do this painting in his studio with a life model? A preliminary drawing in a sketchbook from the same year (at the Musée Picasso, Paris) shows that he had already finalized the composition before starting the painting. In his drawings he also experimented with spatial projections of the entirely flat pictorial elements in the painting. Besides the outside world of nature, he also found inspiration in the inner world of the imagination. Here we see the ghostlike figure of a woman, bright yellow and baring her teeth in the form of vagina dentate, as she slides through the colour zones and structures of the painting. Sections of the body and suggestions of an interior are taken apart and reassembled into an abstract structure.

By 1927 at the latest Picasso had met the young Marie-Thérèse Walter, who soon became his lover. The dramatic work Le sauvetage (Rescue) shows three women, each bearing a resemblance to Marie-Thérèse. The figure at the centre, seemingly still just alive, is being rescued from the water as though she were the mirror image of the upper figure. This and the ubiquitous narcissi prompted Reinhold Hohl to interpret the painting as an adaptation of the myth of Narcissus, who in Ovid’s Metamorphoses is said to have fallen in love with his own reflection and, as he died, transmuted into the flower named after him. Transformation is the painting’s overriding theme: the flowers are formed in the breath of the rescued figure, while as an ensemble the three bodies merge into a single overarching gesture. One feature in the work bears particular art historical interest: the uppermost head shows the first instance of a facial expression that was to recur in 1937 in one of the central figures in Guernica.

Following a period from 1924 to 1934 influenced by Surrealism, Picasso continued to employ the ‘surreal’ pictorial idiom he had evolved over those years in the works he produced from 1935 to 1939 and thereafter. Against the backdrop of war, however, they frequently became imbued with a new and distraught undertone. Dream was superseded by nightmare. Besides the work that was influenced directly by events on the world stage (Guernica, 1937), their impact is also felt in the portraits Picasso painted of individuals – in particular of his lover Dora Maar. We sense his preoccupation with these events in the painting and the etching of Weeping Woman, 1937, a type of image that Picasso was originally intending to incorporate in the array of figures in Guernica but then developed as a separate group of works. Whereas the extreme displays of feeling in his works between 1924 and 1934 often mirrored emotional tensions in Picasso’s private life, here the agitated expression grounded in years of Surrealism depicted the shared, universal suffering of people caught up in the horrors of war. Beyond her individual nature, Dora is elevated into a mater dolorosa (Mother of Sorrows) – emancipated from the realm of religion – of the age of ideologies and their consequences.

On 27 April 1938 Picasso sketched the head and shoulders of Dora, seated and wearing a hat. With ears and eyes that look as if they have been glued on, her appearance is as constructed as the chair she is sitting on. The figure and the furniture are also joined together by the lines of ink crisscrossing the picture like a cobweb. In conjunction with Dora‘s dejected gaze, they create an impression of a figure in captivity, contrasting with the gaiety of the colouring. In further drawings made over the following days, Picasso extended his portrayal of the seated Dora to include her full body, a pictorial idea that on 31 May culminated in this outstanding large painting in the Fondation’s collection. Here, all whimsical, burlesque elements have been dismissed: like a prison cell, grey walls surround the depicted figure on all sides. An enormous assembly of clunky forms resembling an insect-like monument, both terrifying and terrified in one, Dora is enthroned on the skeleton of a chair. The chair has fully merged with the body and is reminiscent of a torture rack, with the body’s limbs draped across chair’s armrests as if mounted on the beams of a cross. Yet in the drawing from 4 July 1938, also in the Fondation’s collection, which shows Dora coquettishly raising her hand to her mouth, Picasso reverts the massive, sombre composition back into a mood of surreal levity.

This impressive painting, presumed to have been executed in 1944, appears to show Dora Maar enthroned on a chair in a narrow, confined room with her gaze fixed on the viewer. Some aspects of the painting suggest that Picasso was well acquainted with another work in the Fondation’s collection, Cézanne’s Madame Cézanne. Besides the position of the hands, depicted in a similar way in both paintings, a parallel can be observed in the space on the right between the arm and the body, which in both works shows something other than what we might expect. In Cézanne we see the wall rather than the armchair, in Picasso a section of the wall but without the anticipated corner of the room. Thus, towards the end of the war Picasso was referring back to the cherished touchstone Cézanne; whereas Cézanne portrays his wife with cool aloofness, Picasso gives Dora a dog’s head – an expression, perhaps, of how relations with her had deteriorated since May 1943 and the arrival of Françoise Gilot?

Picasso’s Petite femme aux bras écartés (Little woman with outstretched arms) was a study for a monumental sculpture that was executed in concrete for the country estate of the Picasso’s art dealer Daniel-Henry Kahnweiler.

There are four versions of Femme au chapeau, although this is the only one Picasso also later painted. The figure’s volume is created not only by the folds in the metal but also by the staggered arrangement of several planes, which cast shadows and present different vistas through the gaps. It renders a figure in all its complexity, showing the mouth and chin in profile, but the eyes from the front. The eye the viewer can look straight through creates a different effect from the one with the brown background.

In his late period Picasso developed as astonishingly expressive style of painting which had little regard for conventions. Almost every day he completed a large, dramatically executed painting, a productive output that reads like a diary. In Picasso’s works one can observe the rhythm of his brushstrokes in what one might more appropriately describe as painted drawings than colour compositions. In this large horizontal-format grisaille painting Picasso portrayed his favourite model at that time, his wife Jacqueline, as an odalisque toying with a kitten – an allegory of languid, self-assured eroticism. But the figure’s posture is also reminiscent of Etruscan sarcophagus imagery, allowing one to see the motif as a symbol of death. In stylistic terms, the painting harks back to his much earlier work Femme from 1907: in both pieces he delineates the figure with arc-shaped brush strokes and contrasts unpainted with painted areas of the canvas.

A beautiful, opulent woman is voluptuously sprawled out in deep sleep, watched over by a man. Picasso was a master in his treatment of desire as an artistic theme. In Nu couché et homme au masque (Reclining nude and man with mask) the made-up woman with long, varnished fingernails of somewhat threatening nature is being observed, strictly speaking, by one man with three faces: the bearded youth with a penetrating gaze and an eye in his forehead reminiscent of the giant Cyclops Polyphemus, casts a shadow which does not seem to be made by his own head. In it we recognize a classical Greco-Roman profile. The mask the youth is holding up shows the wrinkled face of an old man. Could this be meant by the then 88-year-old Picasso as a reference to himself, to someone who is in fact young but concealed behind a façade of old age? This interpretation is suggested by the assurance of the scant lines delineating the figures and the drawing that feels as though it was dashed off in a single unhesitating gesture.

For Picasso, as for many other artists, the flower bouquet was an opportunity to explore the possibilities of painting – although in this case colour is not necessarily his main interest. The picture’s point of departure are the forms of the vase and the bouquet, which on first sight seem to be no more than a muddle of brush strokes. But it is worth following the individual strokes: they result from the painterly gestures shaped by Picasso’s irrepressible willpower and fluid style. Paradoxical as it may sound, they show him above all to be an unrivalled master of line drawing. Whether with brush, pen or pencil, he was capable of rendering every line with a kind of emotionally charged ‘effet’, investing his pictures with compelling excitement.