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Lot Essay
Maya Widmaier-Picasso has confirmed the authenticity of this work.
Claude Picasso has confirmed the authenticity of this work.
Dora Maar acquired this ink and wash drawing directly from Picasso. It is in fact a portrait of her; this drawing may well qualify as the most radical and minimal rendering of Dora's features that Picasso ever created, although the artist would have surely protested it being called an abstract work. He famously declared to Christian Zervos in 1935: "There is no abstract art. You must always start with something. Afterward you can remove all traces of reality." When Giménez Caballero that same year asked "if art should be abstract," Picasso responded, "No. Unaffected, simple, direct. It is like a bridge. What would be the best bridge? Well, the one which could be reduced to a thread, a line, without anything left over; which fulfilled strictly its function of uniting two separate distances" (both quotes in D. Ashton, ed., Picasso on Art, New York, 1972, pp. 64 and 65). Picasso might have held up the present drawing to demonstrate these ideas.
This drawing was ascribed the date circa 1936 when it was included in Dora Maar's estate sale in Paris, 1998. This appears to be far too early; Picasso would have never subjected a lover's visage so early in a blossoming relationship to this third degree of pictorial deconstruction. Mr. Krugier, the purchaser, following the lead of Léon Krempel writing in the 1999 touring exhibition (op. cit.), expanded the dating to the sensibly broader range of 1936-1940. As the decade of the 30s wore on, Picasso forced Dora's mysteriously intense but inscrutably impassive visage to mirror in his work that ominous and troubled mood in Europe during the increasingly violent years that preceded the Second World War. Once the war began on 1 September 1939, Picasso began to subject Dora's face in his paintings and drawings to sometimes unflinching brutality.
A survey of Picasso's drawings during this period suggests that the drawing was done near the end of the revised time-frame, that is, during late 1939 or early 1940, in Royan, the town on the western coast of France to which Picasso and Dora had fled from Paris for fear of German bombardment which in the artist's mind would have reminded him of the attack on Guernica from the air. Here Dora's visage is little more than a crescent moon, aptly suggesting her darkly lunar temperament, with her hair falling down along the curved back of her neck. The bead-like eyes set in diamond-shaped boxes appear elsewhere only briefly in a gouache and oil painting dated 3 March 1940 (Zervos. vol. 10, nos. 301 and 374). During this period, furthermore, Picasso liked to darken with black ink wash the backgrounds of his works on paper to create a relief effect around the subject. In the present work he has taken this practice further, generating the crescent face by applying the black ink wash over much of the full face which had existed previously, adding a further layer of nuance to the present work.
Claude Picasso has confirmed the authenticity of this work.
Dora Maar acquired this ink and wash drawing directly from Picasso. It is in fact a portrait of her; this drawing may well qualify as the most radical and minimal rendering of Dora's features that Picasso ever created, although the artist would have surely protested it being called an abstract work. He famously declared to Christian Zervos in 1935: "There is no abstract art. You must always start with something. Afterward you can remove all traces of reality." When Giménez Caballero that same year asked "if art should be abstract," Picasso responded, "No. Unaffected, simple, direct. It is like a bridge. What would be the best bridge? Well, the one which could be reduced to a thread, a line, without anything left over; which fulfilled strictly its function of uniting two separate distances" (both quotes in D. Ashton, ed., Picasso on Art, New York, 1972, pp. 64 and 65). Picasso might have held up the present drawing to demonstrate these ideas.
This drawing was ascribed the date circa 1936 when it was included in Dora Maar's estate sale in Paris, 1998. This appears to be far too early; Picasso would have never subjected a lover's visage so early in a blossoming relationship to this third degree of pictorial deconstruction. Mr. Krugier, the purchaser, following the lead of Léon Krempel writing in the 1999 touring exhibition (op. cit.), expanded the dating to the sensibly broader range of 1936-1940. As the decade of the 30s wore on, Picasso forced Dora's mysteriously intense but inscrutably impassive visage to mirror in his work that ominous and troubled mood in Europe during the increasingly violent years that preceded the Second World War. Once the war began on 1 September 1939, Picasso began to subject Dora's face in his paintings and drawings to sometimes unflinching brutality.
A survey of Picasso's drawings during this period suggests that the drawing was done near the end of the revised time-frame, that is, during late 1939 or early 1940, in Royan, the town on the western coast of France to which Picasso and Dora had fled from Paris for fear of German bombardment which in the artist's mind would have reminded him of the attack on Guernica from the air. Here Dora's visage is little more than a crescent moon, aptly suggesting her darkly lunar temperament, with her hair falling down along the curved back of her neck. The bead-like eyes set in diamond-shaped boxes appear elsewhere only briefly in a gouache and oil painting dated 3 March 1940 (Zervos. vol. 10, nos. 301 and 374). During this period, furthermore, Picasso liked to darken with black ink wash the backgrounds of his works on paper to create a relief effect around the subject. In the present work he has taken this practice further, generating the crescent face by applying the black ink wash over much of the full face which had existed previously, adding a further layer of nuance to the present work.