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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.
Picasso spent the summer of 1929 in the beachfront town of Dinard with his wife, Olga, and son, Paulo (fig. 1). His relationship with Olga, now more than a decade old, was troubled and beyond repair. For the past two years, the artist had been having an affair with Marie-Thérèse Walter, a vivacious, beautiful and youthful antidote to his difficult and tormented wife, whose bouts of illness and internments in clinics further stressed their already fragile relationship. As he had arranged during the family’s stay in Dinard the previous summer, Picasso ensured that Marie-Thérèse stayed close to the family’s rented villa, allowing for the artist to escape from his home life when needed and to have unbridled access to his young mistress.
Picasso’s work from this summer reflects his maneuvering between the two vastly different women in his life; images of his young muse frolicking on the beach are interspersed with jagged, fissured images of heads. As Elizabeth Cowling has noted, during this period “Picasso began to speak of his art as a form of catharsis, to insist upon the importance of the artist’s private emotion as both the generator and the substance of his work, and to recommend expressionist drama above canonical beauty. These ideas…must have possessed a compelling truth at a time when his own life was being lived on the edge, as he kept up the appearance of a viable bourgeois marriage while secretly conducting an absorbing affair with a much younger woman” (E. Cowling, Picasso, Style and Meaning, London, 2002, p. 490).
The present work is a marvelous example of the bifurcated head which preoccupied the artist that summer. He spent ample time experimenting with the composition, as evidenced in his sketchbooks which detail the subject (fig. 2). These heads present two faces in one. The two profiles facing each other are two halves of a single face, representing both the unity and duality of the human being. Picasso expressed his “catharsis” primarily through images of women, and the three lines of long dark hair in the present painting indeed suggest that the subject of this picture is Olga. Olga’s bust is comprised of two separate white and blue semicircular forms mounted atop torsos clad in white. During this month, Picasso also painted several compositions in which two figures face one another in profile, such as his seminal work Le Baiser (fig. 3), painted just two days after the present painting. Much like Le Baiser, the profile at left in the present work is composed of a protruding triangle to form a nose atop a concave line to represent the mouth, further defined with four notches for teeth. The profile at right is simply constructed of a concave semicircle. However, where in Le Baiser, the space separating the two profiles is innocuous and clearly reads as background, this space in Tête is painted with a deep, violent red. The red forms a thick, strong neck which rises from the top of torso and cracks open the head. The violent penetration of the two spheres of the head is further solidified in the background, where the dividing line continues onto the wall in the background, and one side is painted green and the other beige. This ferocious bifurcation of the subject visually details the bipolar disorder from which Olga was acutely suffering. As John Richardson has noted, “resentment and superstitious fear of sickness in women–Olga, above all–proved to be a source of demonic energy” (A Life of Picasso, The Triumphant Years, 1917-1932, New York, 2009, p. 369). However, Picasso’s images of women at this time also serve as vehicles of emotional drama, and can be considered to stand in as alter egos for Picasso himself.
(fig. 1) The artist with his wife, Olga and son, Paulo.
(fig. 2) Pablo Picasso, Etudes, 24 August 1929.
(fig. 3) Pablo Picasso, Le Baiser, 1929. Musée Picasso, Paris.
Claude Picasso has confirmed the authenticity of this work.
Picasso spent the summer of 1929 in the beachfront town of Dinard with his wife, Olga, and son, Paulo (fig. 1). His relationship with Olga, now more than a decade old, was troubled and beyond repair. For the past two years, the artist had been having an affair with Marie-Thérèse Walter, a vivacious, beautiful and youthful antidote to his difficult and tormented wife, whose bouts of illness and internments in clinics further stressed their already fragile relationship. As he had arranged during the family’s stay in Dinard the previous summer, Picasso ensured that Marie-Thérèse stayed close to the family’s rented villa, allowing for the artist to escape from his home life when needed and to have unbridled access to his young mistress.
Picasso’s work from this summer reflects his maneuvering between the two vastly different women in his life; images of his young muse frolicking on the beach are interspersed with jagged, fissured images of heads. As Elizabeth Cowling has noted, during this period “Picasso began to speak of his art as a form of catharsis, to insist upon the importance of the artist’s private emotion as both the generator and the substance of his work, and to recommend expressionist drama above canonical beauty. These ideas…must have possessed a compelling truth at a time when his own life was being lived on the edge, as he kept up the appearance of a viable bourgeois marriage while secretly conducting an absorbing affair with a much younger woman” (E. Cowling, Picasso, Style and Meaning, London, 2002, p. 490).
The present work is a marvelous example of the bifurcated head which preoccupied the artist that summer. He spent ample time experimenting with the composition, as evidenced in his sketchbooks which detail the subject (fig. 2). These heads present two faces in one. The two profiles facing each other are two halves of a single face, representing both the unity and duality of the human being. Picasso expressed his “catharsis” primarily through images of women, and the three lines of long dark hair in the present painting indeed suggest that the subject of this picture is Olga. Olga’s bust is comprised of two separate white and blue semicircular forms mounted atop torsos clad in white. During this month, Picasso also painted several compositions in which two figures face one another in profile, such as his seminal work Le Baiser (fig. 3), painted just two days after the present painting. Much like Le Baiser, the profile at left in the present work is composed of a protruding triangle to form a nose atop a concave line to represent the mouth, further defined with four notches for teeth. The profile at right is simply constructed of a concave semicircle. However, where in Le Baiser, the space separating the two profiles is innocuous and clearly reads as background, this space in Tête is painted with a deep, violent red. The red forms a thick, strong neck which rises from the top of torso and cracks open the head. The violent penetration of the two spheres of the head is further solidified in the background, where the dividing line continues onto the wall in the background, and one side is painted green and the other beige. This ferocious bifurcation of the subject visually details the bipolar disorder from which Olga was acutely suffering. As John Richardson has noted, “resentment and superstitious fear of sickness in women–Olga, above all–proved to be a source of demonic energy” (A Life of Picasso, The Triumphant Years, 1917-1932, New York, 2009, p. 369). However, Picasso’s images of women at this time also serve as vehicles of emotional drama, and can be considered to stand in as alter egos for Picasso himself.
(fig. 1) The artist with his wife, Olga and son, Paulo.
(fig. 2) Pablo Picasso, Etudes, 24 August 1929.
(fig. 3) Pablo Picasso, Le Baiser, 1929. Musée Picasso, Paris.