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Lot Essay
Pablo Picasso's Etude pour 'Les Saltimbanques' plunges the viewer into the timeless, lyrical world of the circus folk who peopled so many of his pictures during the middle of the first decade of the Twentieth Century. These are archetypal figures from Picasso's celebrated Rose Period, which featured a poetic, mystical atmosphere filled with a tenderness and delicacy that had evolved from the melancholy of the Blue Period yet which was clearly less grounded in sadness. Instead, the figures of the entertainers such as those in his famous picture from 1905, La famille des saltimbanques, now in the National Gallery of Art, Washington DC peopled Picasso's works, introducing a pathos yet also a playful and whimsical quality.
Etude pour 'Les Saltimbanques' is infused with this new quality, showing its various vignettes of a woman adjusting her hair, clearly relating to the theme of La toilette which Picasso would also explore during this period, as well as a mother and child and, in the centre, underneath the study of leaves, a figure based on the Hellenistic sculpture, Lo spinario. That sculpture has provided inspiration to countless generations of artists and would appear several times in Picasso's works, later in a study for his proto-Cubist masterpiece Les demoiselles d'Avignon, now in the Museum of Modern Art, New York, yet also in 1906 in Les adolescents, a 1906 painting in the National Gallery of Art, Washington DC in which the left-hand figure is inverted yet is closely related to this one, even down to the block upon which he is seated.
Using this range of characters, who relate to the figures in pictures of saltimbanques, women in the harem and other timeless situations, Picasso managed to conjure a sense of the classical, yet as is clear in this study, he was also exploring new ways of rendering a sense of volume in his work. The figure to the right adjusting her hair relates to many of the transitional pictures that would gradually evolve into the earliest stages of Cubis. These female figures were inspired largely by Picasso's partner of this period, Fernande Olivier, and also by the experimentation with various substances including opium that the pair and their friends indulged in during the period. Certainly, the Etude pour 'Les Saltimbanques' is filled with the hazy and delicate atmosphere of this period, a poetic ambience that also reflected Picasso's friendship with various writers of the time, especially Guillaume Apollinaire, whom he had met around 1904. Looking at Etude pour 'Les Saltimbanques', with its deeply contemplative atmosphere, increased by the intense focus of the central figure on his foot, it comes as no surprise to find that at this time, Picasso's studio door in the legendary Bateau Lavoir in Paris sported a sign that declared it the Rendez-vous des poètes.
Etude pour 'Les Saltimbanques' is infused with this new quality, showing its various vignettes of a woman adjusting her hair, clearly relating to the theme of La toilette which Picasso would also explore during this period, as well as a mother and child and, in the centre, underneath the study of leaves, a figure based on the Hellenistic sculpture, Lo spinario. That sculpture has provided inspiration to countless generations of artists and would appear several times in Picasso's works, later in a study for his proto-Cubist masterpiece Les demoiselles d'Avignon, now in the Museum of Modern Art, New York, yet also in 1906 in Les adolescents, a 1906 painting in the National Gallery of Art, Washington DC in which the left-hand figure is inverted yet is closely related to this one, even down to the block upon which he is seated.
Using this range of characters, who relate to the figures in pictures of saltimbanques, women in the harem and other timeless situations, Picasso managed to conjure a sense of the classical, yet as is clear in this study, he was also exploring new ways of rendering a sense of volume in his work. The figure to the right adjusting her hair relates to many of the transitional pictures that would gradually evolve into the earliest stages of Cubis. These female figures were inspired largely by Picasso's partner of this period, Fernande Olivier, and also by the experimentation with various substances including opium that the pair and their friends indulged in during the period. Certainly, the Etude pour 'Les Saltimbanques' is filled with the hazy and delicate atmosphere of this period, a poetic ambience that also reflected Picasso's friendship with various writers of the time, especially Guillaume Apollinaire, whom he had met around 1904. Looking at Etude pour 'Les Saltimbanques', with its deeply contemplative atmosphere, increased by the intense focus of the central figure on his foot, it comes as no surprise to find that at this time, Picasso's studio door in the legendary Bateau Lavoir in Paris sported a sign that declared it the Rendez-vous des poètes.