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Lot Essay
Vigne comes from the collection of the late William S. Rubin, former director of the Paintings and Sculpture Department at The Museum of Modern Art, New York. He first met Picasso in 1971 when he acquired for MOMA the groundbreaking cubist construction Guitare, 1912 (Zervos, vol. 2**, no. 773; see lot 23, fig. 7). The two men developed a strong rapport, meeting frequently during the remaining 2 years of the artist's life to talk about art and continued building MoMA's incomparable collection of Picasso's art (fig. 1). Mr. Rubin included Vigne in the 1996 exhibition Picasso and Portraiture, and took this occasion to discuss the drawing at length:
"The disparity between the fragmentation of Picasso's 1910-1914 Cubist personages and the massive solidity of his new, realistic and somewhat classicizing figures makes it difficult to see the extent to which his representational drawings after 1914 remained indebted to Cubism. The continuity of his work is more evident in certain still-lifes and landscapes in which the subdivided nature of the motif aligned with the picture's infrastructure.
"Comparing Picasso's 1921 drawing of vine leaves with any of Matisse's line drawings of similar motifs, one is astonished by how much Cubism could be subsumed in Picasso's Neoclassicism. Matisse's more lyric, decorative line characteristically 'sits' on the picture plane, reconfirming its flatness; Picasso's line 'bites' sculpturally into the surface. Even without the aid of shading, the leaves seem to bow outward toward the spectator in a shallow frontal space deriving from Cézanne. Within the rectangle of the drawing paper, the leaves are 'set' in a Cubist manner, their accented forms piling up toward the center and dissolving toward the edges. The 'architecture' of the branches echoes the vertical and horizontal axes of the field, locking the curved and diagonal accents into its scaffolding. Even the little cluster of grapes near the top serves as a 'button' for the composition in a manner analogous to the nails, knobs and clusters of green that often 'anchor' Cubist compositions at top or bottom" (exh. cat., op. cit., 1996, p. 39).
Picasso executed La Vigne on 4 July 1921, less than a couple of weeks after arriving in Fontainebleau, outside Paris, for his summer-long vacation with his wife Olga and their infant son Paulo (see lots 26 and 56). As he was settling into to his new surroundings and setting up his studio, he made some drawings of the exterior and interior of his rented house, and its grounds. The varied repetition of forms among the grape leaves probably caught his eye, and he would have considered the vine for its history as a decorative device used in classical art, and of course its significance to the cult of the wine god Dionysus in antiquity. La Vigne is as large, as elaborately composed and as finely rendered as any of the neoclassical figure drawings that Picasso completed that summer. As John Richardson has declared, "Fontainebleau proved to be the apogee of Picasso's Classicism" (Picasso: The Classical Period, exh. cat., C&M Arts, New York, p. 19).
William S. Rubin served as Director Emeritus of MOMA for over twenty years, from 1967 to 1988, developing the collection he inherited from the museum's founding director, Alfred H. Barr, Jr. Under Rubin's leadership MOMA acquired countless additional works, greatly enhancing their holdings of various artists, including Picasso. Rubin's firsthand account of this endeavor, written in the last years of his life, will be published in the forthcoming A Curator's Quest: Building The Museum of Modern Art's Painting and Sculpture Collection, 1967-1988, to be published in 2011. The volume will include color reproductions of nearly 240 acquisitions made in his tenure, grouped by Rubin to show the very best.
(fig. 1) Picasso and William S. Rubin on the grounds of the artist's home in Mougins, 1971. Photograph by Jacqueline Picasso.
Barcode: 2660 3254
"The disparity between the fragmentation of Picasso's 1910-1914 Cubist personages and the massive solidity of his new, realistic and somewhat classicizing figures makes it difficult to see the extent to which his representational drawings after 1914 remained indebted to Cubism. The continuity of his work is more evident in certain still-lifes and landscapes in which the subdivided nature of the motif aligned with the picture's infrastructure.
"Comparing Picasso's 1921 drawing of vine leaves with any of Matisse's line drawings of similar motifs, one is astonished by how much Cubism could be subsumed in Picasso's Neoclassicism. Matisse's more lyric, decorative line characteristically 'sits' on the picture plane, reconfirming its flatness; Picasso's line 'bites' sculpturally into the surface. Even without the aid of shading, the leaves seem to bow outward toward the spectator in a shallow frontal space deriving from Cézanne. Within the rectangle of the drawing paper, the leaves are 'set' in a Cubist manner, their accented forms piling up toward the center and dissolving toward the edges. The 'architecture' of the branches echoes the vertical and horizontal axes of the field, locking the curved and diagonal accents into its scaffolding. Even the little cluster of grapes near the top serves as a 'button' for the composition in a manner analogous to the nails, knobs and clusters of green that often 'anchor' Cubist compositions at top or bottom" (exh. cat., op. cit., 1996, p. 39).
Picasso executed La Vigne on 4 July 1921, less than a couple of weeks after arriving in Fontainebleau, outside Paris, for his summer-long vacation with his wife Olga and their infant son Paulo (see lots 26 and 56). As he was settling into to his new surroundings and setting up his studio, he made some drawings of the exterior and interior of his rented house, and its grounds. The varied repetition of forms among the grape leaves probably caught his eye, and he would have considered the vine for its history as a decorative device used in classical art, and of course its significance to the cult of the wine god Dionysus in antiquity. La Vigne is as large, as elaborately composed and as finely rendered as any of the neoclassical figure drawings that Picasso completed that summer. As John Richardson has declared, "Fontainebleau proved to be the apogee of Picasso's Classicism" (Picasso: The Classical Period, exh. cat., C&M Arts, New York, p. 19).
William S. Rubin served as Director Emeritus of MOMA for over twenty years, from 1967 to 1988, developing the collection he inherited from the museum's founding director, Alfred H. Barr, Jr. Under Rubin's leadership MOMA acquired countless additional works, greatly enhancing their holdings of various artists, including Picasso. Rubin's firsthand account of this endeavor, written in the last years of his life, will be published in the forthcoming A Curator's Quest: Building The Museum of Modern Art's Painting and Sculpture Collection, 1967-1988, to be published in 2011. The volume will include color reproductions of nearly 240 acquisitions made in his tenure, grouped by Rubin to show the very best.
(fig. 1) Picasso and William S. Rubin on the grounds of the artist's home in Mougins, 1971. Photograph by Jacqueline Picasso.
Barcode: 2660 3254