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Lot Essay
Making dramatic use of the fundamental chromatic contrasts inherent in the tricolore palette, Picasso has depicted in this Femme assise of 1953 the glowing moon-like visage and slim angled figure of Françoise Gilot, transforming her into a goddess in a red dress, a queen of the night. This beautiful woman had presided in Picasso's life for the previous seven years as mistress, muse and the mother of their children Claude and Paloma (fig. 1). "Her youth and vivacity, the chestnut colour of her luminous eyes, and her intelligent and authoritative approach," Roland Penrose rhapsodized, "gave her a presence which was both Arcadian and very much of this earth" (Picasso: His Life and Work, Berkeley, 1981, p. 358). Her presence had been absolutely essential to the remarkable endeavor upon which Picasso set forth during the post-war years--no mean feat for a man who in 1951 turned seventy years old--within a context Michael FitzGerald delineated as "a triangle of ambitions: art, politics and the family" (Picasso and Portraiture, exh. cat., The Museum of Modern Art, New York, 1996, pp. 409-445).
In the late 1940s, Picasso desired to establish a new, more profoundly deep and durable love relationship, presumably one that might bear him into his old age, and so he set his eye on Françoise Gilot, a woman some forty years his junior, and made her his companion. Even more astonishing is that he was in no way reluctant at this late stage to start an entirely new family--he was, indeed, keen on the idea--with not just one child as he had fathered in the 1920s with his wife Olga, and subsequently in the 1930s by his mistress Marie-Thérèse, but with Françoise he joyously sired two children in little less than a couple of years. Picasso during this time also reached beyond the fame he had already won as the world's leading living artist to become an even more visible figure in the public eye by taking to the road of radical politics: in the fall of 1944, following the liberation of Paris, he joined the French Communist Party. He lent his time and, when it pleased him, the imprimatur of his art to the party's cause on behalf of their program for world peace. And of course, always absolutely paramount, there was his art, the be-all and end-all for virtually everything else in his life, always born from an innate, well-practiced and unassailable genius that had never let him down. It was unlikely that Picasso undertook any of these actions as part of some well-considered agenda and certainly nothing like a Soviet five-year plan. He was instead the consummate opportunist, with the ability to shape any exigency, come what may, to his needs; and he was as well a man who possessed the charismatic, magus-like powers that could induce--even compel--others to fall in step with his desires and needs.
During the late 1940s, following the births of Claude and Paloma, Picasso had very nearly perfected his vision of a classical Mediterranean paradise. It did not matter that their house "La Galloise" in Vallauris was, as Penrose described it, an "ungracious little pink villa," with "bleak rooms" (op. cit., p. 369). He found a vacant factory nearby in which to establish spacious studios for painting and sculpture. He spent more and more time at the Madoura Pottery Works indulging his pleasure in making hand-decorated ceramic wares. "In this fertile and friendly atmosphere Picasso inevitably resembled the chief of a tribe--a tribe which had as its nucleus the family at 'La Galloise' and extended to the craftsmen at the potteries," Penrose recalled. "The tribe also embraced many local tradespeople and artisans, the barber, the carpenter, the baker, and the fishermen from Golfe Juan joined the throng, all sharing admiration and affection for the little man with black eyes and white hair who had come to live among them and to whom the new celebrity of their town was due. He became a legend among them... Even if they did not understand his work they were conquered by his personality" (ibid., pp. 371 and 372).
By 1950, however, various strands in his large and complicated mix had begun to unravel, beginning at home. Picasso's relationship with Françoise was showing increasing and unsettling strain, especially for her. Picasso was, of course, deeply involved in his painting, and he devoted whatever time he could spare from his work to the French Communist Party's pro-peace activities. Picasso and Françoise were both in Paris when Paloma was born, she in the hospital and he at a session of the Peace Congress in the Salle Pleyel. Françoise neither desired nor assumed any active role in this increasingly visible public aspect of her partner's life. Instead she remained out of the limelight, maintaining her privacy at "La Galloise" as best she could manage, having fully immersed herself in the full-time responsibilities of bringing up two of their children, while shielding them from curious eyes.
Around the same time, following a hiatus of several years, Françoise began to take a renewed interest in furthering the cause of her own painting. This development led to the first solo exhibition of her work in April 1952 at Galerie Louise Leiris, the gallery backed by Daniel-Henry Kahnweiler, Picasso's long-time friend and primary dealer, who organized the event (fig. 2). Jean Cassou of the French Ministry of Culture purchased one her paintings for the permanent collection of Musée d'Art Moderne, Paris.
Picasso did not attend the opening, ostensibly to avoid stealing the spotlight from his companion and the debut of her work. Françoise had nonetheless detected ambivalent feelings in Picasso's response to her resumption of painting, or more generally, to her efforts at making an independent career and reputation for herself. He preferred instead that she continue devoting herself to their children, and indeed he had been pressuring her to have a third child, which she firmly refused to do (Zervos, vol. 15, no. 207; fig. 3). They began to grow apart, a situation further exacerbated by spreading rumors that Picasso had been seeing another woman, whom friends identified to Françoise as Geneviève Laporte, then in her mid-twenties. Geneviève and Picasso met during the Occupation, when as a teenaged schoolgirl she had shown up at Picasso's studio asking for information and advice for a class art project. They spent a holiday together in Saint-Tropez during the summer of 1951. She wrote a book about her relationship with Picasso, titled Sunshine at Midnight, (Si tard le Soir in France), which was published in 1973, shortly after the death of the artist. She became a poet and film-maker. Françoise eventually took her own lover, a young Greek man, with whom she had an affair that lasted several months, ending soon after her eventual break with Picasso.
Against this background of events, as their relationship gradually deteriorated, Picasso painted the present Femme assise in early March 1953, not long before Françoise traveled to Paris to prepare stage sets for Janine Charrat's ballet Héraklès at the Théâtre des Champs-Elysées. Françoise did not actually sit for this painting--she and other chief players among Picasso's women rarely did--it is instead the artist's conjuring of her presence as he envisioned her in his mind's eye. Picasso had done fewer than a dozen paintings since the beginning of the year, all depicting Françoise, except for a single canvas showing Paloma with a doll (Picasso Project, no. 53-004a). There is an astonishing painting of a Françoise woman playing (or more like wrestling) on the floor with a ferocious characterization of their pet boxer Yan (Zervos, vol. 15, no. 245; fig. 4). If one reads Picasso-like features into Yan's expression, this subject may well suggest the growing contest of wills between Picasso and Françoise.
Picasso has created an equivocal mood in this Femme assise by playing off the startling red of Françoise's dress, the brilliant lunar white of her face and hands against the deeply somber nocturnal cyan blue of the background. He has moreover employed here a favorite vintage device in depicting Françoise's face: he joined two profiles along the center nose-line to create a single forward-looking visage. The feminine right side, with the woman's hair pulled back and tied in a chignon, is Françoise. The left-hand profile contains the unmistakable wide-open eye, the mira fuerte ("strong gaze") that Picasso usually claimed for his own persona in his works. The use of conjoined profiles dates back to the late 1920s, when Picasso first used them to express Olga's typically difficult behavior, which is now believed to have stemmed from a bipolar condition. In the present Femme assise, Picasso used the opposing profiles to project the internalized conflict that Françoise was experiencing over the troubling state of their relationship, which was now an increasingly frequent subject of testy discussion between them. One may also observe in Picasso's later paintings of Françoise that her hair is less often seen free and loosed in the manner he was once most fond of depicting her, but is instead shown pulled back and worn in a chignon, and in some cases confined within a hair net, as if to suggest an element of constraint, of holding back, in her feelings toward him. Françoise later openly revealed the issues she was pondering at this time in her memoir Life with Picasso, written with Carlton Lake and published in New York, 1964. Picasso angrily made an unsuccessful attempt to prevent publication of the subsequent French edition. Françoise wrote:
"After Paloma was born, in the moments when I wanted to promote a real fusion between us [Picasso] withdrew abruptly. When I, as a result, withdrew into my own solitude, that seemed to rekindle his interest. He began to reach out to me again, unwilling to see me serene so close to him yet without him. The heart of the problem, I soon came to understand, was that with Pablo there must always be a victor and a vanquished. I could not be satisfied with being the victor, nor, I think, could anyone else who is emotionally mature. There was nothing gained by being vanquished either, because with Pablo, the moment you were vanquished he lost all interest. Since I loved him, I couldn't afford to be vanquished. What does one do in a dilemma like that? The more I thought about it, the less clear the answer seemed" (op. cit., 1964, p. 341).
Picasso continued to paint pictures of Françoise well into the summer of 1953; some show her wide-eyed and irresistible, as if to fix in his mind a reminder of the way things once were, and perhaps to enthrall her, and keep her in his life (Zervos, vol. 15, no. 253; fig. 5). In contrast to the Femme assise works of 1949, the present painting is more plainly cubist and sculptural, and in this respect anticipates the cut metal sculptures that Picasso created in 1954. Continuing this approach, Picasso portrayed Françoise in grand style, full figure, as Nu accroupi, one of greatest of his late nudes, which he painted on 9 July (Zervos, vol. 15, no. 292; fig. 6).
As the summer was drawing to a close Françoise learned she must go to Paris for urgently needed important surgery. She could not arrange for help at home to look after the children during her hospitalization. Picasso protested that he was too busy let her take the time she needed. "I decided there was only thing to do: return to Paris with the children," she later wrote. "I served notice on Pablo that as of September 30 I was moving with them to the apartment in the Rue Gay-Lussac and enrolling them at the Ecole Alsacienne for the fall term. Right up to the last minute Pablo was convinced I would back down. When the taxi pulled up and I got into it with the children and our bags, he as so angry he didn't even say good-bye. He shouted 'Merde!' and went back into the house" (ibid., p. 357).
Françoise had no regrets. She wrote at the very end of her memoir: "Pablo told me, that first afternoon I visited him alone, in February 1944, that our relationship would bring light into both our lives. My coming to him, he said, seemed like a window that was opening up and he wanted it to remain open. I did, too, as long as it let in the light. When it no longer did, I closed it, much against my own desire. From that moment on, he burned all the bridges that connected me to the past I shared with him. But in doing so, he forced me to discover myself and thus to survive. I shall never cease being grateful to him for that" (op. cit., 1964, p. 367). She continued to paint, and became a fine artist in her own right. A weighty monograph of her work was published in 2000. A selection of paintings was included in the exhibition Picasso and Françoise Gilot: Paris-Vallauris, 1943-1953, curated by John Richardson in collaboration with Françoise Gilot, at the Gagosian Gallery, New York, in 2012.
Accustomed for all his adult life to deciding himself when a relationship was over and done with, Picasso took Françoise's decision and departure as severe blows to his pride. During the winter of 1953-1954, the artist lived for the first time in many years without dedicated female companionship. Although he saw the children on various occasions, he missed them sorely. He occupied himself with the series of drawings showing whimsical encounters between artists and their models which were published in a special double issue of Verve in September 1954. He was perhaps smitten in the spring of 1954 with a Bardo-esque young blond named Sylvette David who posed for him. With her fiancé present at their sessions, however, nothing came of this, except those lovely paintings, drawings and sculptures he made of Sylvette, her bangs and pony-tail. The late spring and early summer, however, arrived to mark the next turning point in Picasso's life, when in early June he made the first two paintings of the woman he called "Madame Z" (Zervos vol. 16, nos. 324 [fig. 7] and 325). She was Jacqueline Roque, a young divorcée with whom Picasso had earlier become acquainted while she was working in the Ramiés' store where his ceramics were sold. "L'époque Jacqueline" was at hand.
(fig. 1) Picasso and Françoise Gilot with their children, Claude and Paloma, in the garden of "La Galloise," Vallauris, 1953. Photograph by Edward Quinn; Musée Picasso, Paris. BARCODE: 28853022
(fig. 2) Françoise Gilot preparing her exhibition at Galerie Louise Leiris, Paris, March 1953. Collection Françoise Gilot. BARCODE: 28854883
(fig. 3) Pablo Picasso, Tête de femme, Vallauris, 16 May 1952. Sold, Christie's, New York, 7 November 2012, lot 5. BARCODE: 29520374
(fig. 4) Pablo Picasso, Femme et chien jouant, Vallauris, 8 March 1953. Picasso Museum, Lucerne. BARCODE: 28855361
(fig. 5) Pablo Picasso, Femme assise, Vallauris, 31 March 1953. Sold, Christie's, New York, 1 May 2012, lot 15. BARCODE: 31852388_011
(fig. 6) Pablo Picasso, Nu accroupi, Vallauris, 9 July 1953. The Saint Louis Art Museum. BARCODE: 28855385
(fig. 7) Pablo Picasso, Jacqueline aux fleurs (Portrait de Mme Z.), 2 June 1954. Private collection. BARCODE: 28855392
In the late 1940s, Picasso desired to establish a new, more profoundly deep and durable love relationship, presumably one that might bear him into his old age, and so he set his eye on Françoise Gilot, a woman some forty years his junior, and made her his companion. Even more astonishing is that he was in no way reluctant at this late stage to start an entirely new family--he was, indeed, keen on the idea--with not just one child as he had fathered in the 1920s with his wife Olga, and subsequently in the 1930s by his mistress Marie-Thérèse, but with Françoise he joyously sired two children in little less than a couple of years. Picasso during this time also reached beyond the fame he had already won as the world's leading living artist to become an even more visible figure in the public eye by taking to the road of radical politics: in the fall of 1944, following the liberation of Paris, he joined the French Communist Party. He lent his time and, when it pleased him, the imprimatur of his art to the party's cause on behalf of their program for world peace. And of course, always absolutely paramount, there was his art, the be-all and end-all for virtually everything else in his life, always born from an innate, well-practiced and unassailable genius that had never let him down. It was unlikely that Picasso undertook any of these actions as part of some well-considered agenda and certainly nothing like a Soviet five-year plan. He was instead the consummate opportunist, with the ability to shape any exigency, come what may, to his needs; and he was as well a man who possessed the charismatic, magus-like powers that could induce--even compel--others to fall in step with his desires and needs.
During the late 1940s, following the births of Claude and Paloma, Picasso had very nearly perfected his vision of a classical Mediterranean paradise. It did not matter that their house "La Galloise" in Vallauris was, as Penrose described it, an "ungracious little pink villa," with "bleak rooms" (op. cit., p. 369). He found a vacant factory nearby in which to establish spacious studios for painting and sculpture. He spent more and more time at the Madoura Pottery Works indulging his pleasure in making hand-decorated ceramic wares. "In this fertile and friendly atmosphere Picasso inevitably resembled the chief of a tribe--a tribe which had as its nucleus the family at 'La Galloise' and extended to the craftsmen at the potteries," Penrose recalled. "The tribe also embraced many local tradespeople and artisans, the barber, the carpenter, the baker, and the fishermen from Golfe Juan joined the throng, all sharing admiration and affection for the little man with black eyes and white hair who had come to live among them and to whom the new celebrity of their town was due. He became a legend among them... Even if they did not understand his work they were conquered by his personality" (ibid., pp. 371 and 372).
By 1950, however, various strands in his large and complicated mix had begun to unravel, beginning at home. Picasso's relationship with Françoise was showing increasing and unsettling strain, especially for her. Picasso was, of course, deeply involved in his painting, and he devoted whatever time he could spare from his work to the French Communist Party's pro-peace activities. Picasso and Françoise were both in Paris when Paloma was born, she in the hospital and he at a session of the Peace Congress in the Salle Pleyel. Françoise neither desired nor assumed any active role in this increasingly visible public aspect of her partner's life. Instead she remained out of the limelight, maintaining her privacy at "La Galloise" as best she could manage, having fully immersed herself in the full-time responsibilities of bringing up two of their children, while shielding them from curious eyes.
Around the same time, following a hiatus of several years, Françoise began to take a renewed interest in furthering the cause of her own painting. This development led to the first solo exhibition of her work in April 1952 at Galerie Louise Leiris, the gallery backed by Daniel-Henry Kahnweiler, Picasso's long-time friend and primary dealer, who organized the event (fig. 2). Jean Cassou of the French Ministry of Culture purchased one her paintings for the permanent collection of Musée d'Art Moderne, Paris.
Picasso did not attend the opening, ostensibly to avoid stealing the spotlight from his companion and the debut of her work. Françoise had nonetheless detected ambivalent feelings in Picasso's response to her resumption of painting, or more generally, to her efforts at making an independent career and reputation for herself. He preferred instead that she continue devoting herself to their children, and indeed he had been pressuring her to have a third child, which she firmly refused to do (Zervos, vol. 15, no. 207; fig. 3). They began to grow apart, a situation further exacerbated by spreading rumors that Picasso had been seeing another woman, whom friends identified to Françoise as Geneviève Laporte, then in her mid-twenties. Geneviève and Picasso met during the Occupation, when as a teenaged schoolgirl she had shown up at Picasso's studio asking for information and advice for a class art project. They spent a holiday together in Saint-Tropez during the summer of 1951. She wrote a book about her relationship with Picasso, titled Sunshine at Midnight, (Si tard le Soir in France), which was published in 1973, shortly after the death of the artist. She became a poet and film-maker. Françoise eventually took her own lover, a young Greek man, with whom she had an affair that lasted several months, ending soon after her eventual break with Picasso.
Against this background of events, as their relationship gradually deteriorated, Picasso painted the present Femme assise in early March 1953, not long before Françoise traveled to Paris to prepare stage sets for Janine Charrat's ballet Héraklès at the Théâtre des Champs-Elysées. Françoise did not actually sit for this painting--she and other chief players among Picasso's women rarely did--it is instead the artist's conjuring of her presence as he envisioned her in his mind's eye. Picasso had done fewer than a dozen paintings since the beginning of the year, all depicting Françoise, except for a single canvas showing Paloma with a doll (Picasso Project, no. 53-004a). There is an astonishing painting of a Françoise woman playing (or more like wrestling) on the floor with a ferocious characterization of their pet boxer Yan (Zervos, vol. 15, no. 245; fig. 4). If one reads Picasso-like features into Yan's expression, this subject may well suggest the growing contest of wills between Picasso and Françoise.
Picasso has created an equivocal mood in this Femme assise by playing off the startling red of Françoise's dress, the brilliant lunar white of her face and hands against the deeply somber nocturnal cyan blue of the background. He has moreover employed here a favorite vintage device in depicting Françoise's face: he joined two profiles along the center nose-line to create a single forward-looking visage. The feminine right side, with the woman's hair pulled back and tied in a chignon, is Françoise. The left-hand profile contains the unmistakable wide-open eye, the mira fuerte ("strong gaze") that Picasso usually claimed for his own persona in his works. The use of conjoined profiles dates back to the late 1920s, when Picasso first used them to express Olga's typically difficult behavior, which is now believed to have stemmed from a bipolar condition. In the present Femme assise, Picasso used the opposing profiles to project the internalized conflict that Françoise was experiencing over the troubling state of their relationship, which was now an increasingly frequent subject of testy discussion between them. One may also observe in Picasso's later paintings of Françoise that her hair is less often seen free and loosed in the manner he was once most fond of depicting her, but is instead shown pulled back and worn in a chignon, and in some cases confined within a hair net, as if to suggest an element of constraint, of holding back, in her feelings toward him. Françoise later openly revealed the issues she was pondering at this time in her memoir Life with Picasso, written with Carlton Lake and published in New York, 1964. Picasso angrily made an unsuccessful attempt to prevent publication of the subsequent French edition. Françoise wrote:
"After Paloma was born, in the moments when I wanted to promote a real fusion between us [Picasso] withdrew abruptly. When I, as a result, withdrew into my own solitude, that seemed to rekindle his interest. He began to reach out to me again, unwilling to see me serene so close to him yet without him. The heart of the problem, I soon came to understand, was that with Pablo there must always be a victor and a vanquished. I could not be satisfied with being the victor, nor, I think, could anyone else who is emotionally mature. There was nothing gained by being vanquished either, because with Pablo, the moment you were vanquished he lost all interest. Since I loved him, I couldn't afford to be vanquished. What does one do in a dilemma like that? The more I thought about it, the less clear the answer seemed" (op. cit., 1964, p. 341).
Picasso continued to paint pictures of Françoise well into the summer of 1953; some show her wide-eyed and irresistible, as if to fix in his mind a reminder of the way things once were, and perhaps to enthrall her, and keep her in his life (Zervos, vol. 15, no. 253; fig. 5). In contrast to the Femme assise works of 1949, the present painting is more plainly cubist and sculptural, and in this respect anticipates the cut metal sculptures that Picasso created in 1954. Continuing this approach, Picasso portrayed Françoise in grand style, full figure, as Nu accroupi, one of greatest of his late nudes, which he painted on 9 July (Zervos, vol. 15, no. 292; fig. 6).
As the summer was drawing to a close Françoise learned she must go to Paris for urgently needed important surgery. She could not arrange for help at home to look after the children during her hospitalization. Picasso protested that he was too busy let her take the time she needed. "I decided there was only thing to do: return to Paris with the children," she later wrote. "I served notice on Pablo that as of September 30 I was moving with them to the apartment in the Rue Gay-Lussac and enrolling them at the Ecole Alsacienne for the fall term. Right up to the last minute Pablo was convinced I would back down. When the taxi pulled up and I got into it with the children and our bags, he as so angry he didn't even say good-bye. He shouted 'Merde!' and went back into the house" (ibid., p. 357).
Françoise had no regrets. She wrote at the very end of her memoir: "Pablo told me, that first afternoon I visited him alone, in February 1944, that our relationship would bring light into both our lives. My coming to him, he said, seemed like a window that was opening up and he wanted it to remain open. I did, too, as long as it let in the light. When it no longer did, I closed it, much against my own desire. From that moment on, he burned all the bridges that connected me to the past I shared with him. But in doing so, he forced me to discover myself and thus to survive. I shall never cease being grateful to him for that" (op. cit., 1964, p. 367). She continued to paint, and became a fine artist in her own right. A weighty monograph of her work was published in 2000. A selection of paintings was included in the exhibition Picasso and Françoise Gilot: Paris-Vallauris, 1943-1953, curated by John Richardson in collaboration with Françoise Gilot, at the Gagosian Gallery, New York, in 2012.
Accustomed for all his adult life to deciding himself when a relationship was over and done with, Picasso took Françoise's decision and departure as severe blows to his pride. During the winter of 1953-1954, the artist lived for the first time in many years without dedicated female companionship. Although he saw the children on various occasions, he missed them sorely. He occupied himself with the series of drawings showing whimsical encounters between artists and their models which were published in a special double issue of Verve in September 1954. He was perhaps smitten in the spring of 1954 with a Bardo-esque young blond named Sylvette David who posed for him. With her fiancé present at their sessions, however, nothing came of this, except those lovely paintings, drawings and sculptures he made of Sylvette, her bangs and pony-tail. The late spring and early summer, however, arrived to mark the next turning point in Picasso's life, when in early June he made the first two paintings of the woman he called "Madame Z" (Zervos vol. 16, nos. 324 [fig. 7] and 325). She was Jacqueline Roque, a young divorcée with whom Picasso had earlier become acquainted while she was working in the Ramiés' store where his ceramics were sold. "L'époque Jacqueline" was at hand.
(fig. 1) Picasso and Françoise Gilot with their children, Claude and Paloma, in the garden of "La Galloise," Vallauris, 1953. Photograph by Edward Quinn; Musée Picasso, Paris. BARCODE: 28853022
(fig. 2) Françoise Gilot preparing her exhibition at Galerie Louise Leiris, Paris, March 1953. Collection Françoise Gilot. BARCODE: 28854883
(fig. 3) Pablo Picasso, Tête de femme, Vallauris, 16 May 1952. Sold, Christie's, New York, 7 November 2012, lot 5. BARCODE: 29520374
(fig. 4) Pablo Picasso, Femme et chien jouant, Vallauris, 8 March 1953. Picasso Museum, Lucerne. BARCODE: 28855361
(fig. 5) Pablo Picasso, Femme assise, Vallauris, 31 March 1953. Sold, Christie's, New York, 1 May 2012, lot 15. BARCODE: 31852388_011
(fig. 6) Pablo Picasso, Nu accroupi, Vallauris, 9 July 1953. The Saint Louis Art Museum. BARCODE: 28855385
(fig. 7) Pablo Picasso, Jacqueline aux fleurs (Portrait de Mme Z.), 2 June 1954. Private collection. BARCODE: 28855392