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Lot Essay
‘For Picasso, his studio is a self-portrait in itself. Sensitive to its ritual, its secret poetry, he marks with his presence the environment and the objects in it, and makes his territory into his own “second skin”’
MARIE-LAURE BERNADAC
‘I paint the way some people write their autobiography. The paintings, finished or not, are the pages of my journal, and as such they are valid. The future will choose the pages it prefers. It’s not up to me to make the choice. I have the impression that the time is speeding on past me more and more rapidly… It’s the movement of painting that interests me, the dramatic movement from one effort to the next, even if those efforts are perhaps not pushed to their ultimate end… I have less and less time, and yet I have more and more to say, and what I have to say is, increasingly, something about what goes on in the movement of my thought. I’ve reached the moment, you see, when the movement of my thought interests me more than the thought itself’
PABLO PICASSO
'When Picasso bought La Californie, though he had seen it only by twilight, he realised that its most precious asset to him, in addition to its nearness to Vallauris, was the light that penetrates into every corner of the house. He was happy at once in the luminous atmosphere of the lofty rooms, and as he had done before, he began to paint pictures inspired by the objects that lay around and the tall windows with their art nouveau tracery, through which a yellow-green is filtered by the branches of the palm trees. Day after day he saw his studio anew'
ROLAND PENROSE
Saturated with bold planes of vibrant colour and bursting with an arresting array of pattern and line, La fenêtre de l'atelier presents the haloed realm of Pablo Picasso’s studio at his home, La Californie. Painted on 15 June 1958, this intimate glimpse into a corner of the ornate, light-filled villa, situated in the hills above Cannes is one of the last in a series of what Picasso called paysages d’intérieur (‘interior landscapes’). Just a few months after he painted La fenêtre de l'atelier, he moved from this now-legendary home and studio – so immortalised in photographs it has become the artist’s most famous home – to a large and austere château further inland, escaping the ever-increasing hoards of fans and admirers who sought the great artist. First begun in 1955, these studio scenes serve as captivating visions into the artist’s world as he relentlessly explored both the act of painting itself, and his identity as an artist. Taking painting as his model, in the final decades of his life, Picasso examined with an indefatigable zeal both the relationship between painter and model, and, as the present work shows, the studio itself, immortalizing the site of his promethean artistic creation. More than this however, La fenêtre de l'atelier also serves as a powerful homage to the artist’s friend and rival, Henri Matisse, a towering figure of modern art who had died four years prior. Residing in museums across the world – including the Tate Gallery, London, Musée Picasso and Centre Pompidou, Paris – these studio paintings are among the greatest tributes Picasso made to his great friend and rival, as well as being intimate, revealing glimpses into his life. ‘For Picasso, his studio is a self-portrait in itself’, Marie-Laure Bernadac has written. ‘Sensitive to its ritual, its secret poetry, he marks with his presence the environment and the objects in it, and makes his territory into his own 'second skin'" (M-L. Bernadac, ‘Picasso 1953-1972: Painting as Model’, in Late Picasso, exh. cat., London, 1988, p. 58).
Picasso had moved to La Californie in the summer of 1955. A grand and ornate 19th Century Art Nouveau villa, it provided the perfect working and living space for Picasso, who was immediately captivated by the extravagant flamboyance of the building, attracted to it ‘partly for its Orientalist air’ (Picasso, quoted in J. Richardson, Picasso: The Mediterranean Years, exh. cat., New York, 2010, p. 27). Composed of airy, high ceilinged rooms with large, elegantly ornamented windows that looked out onto luxuriant gardens planted with palm trees, the light-filled and spacious ground floor served as a studio, entertaining space, dining room and storage area for the artist and his lover of the time, Jacqueline Roque. Never before had Picasso had such a large space with which to fill a lifetime of his art, and soon, the rooms became piled not only with his work, but papers, possessions, costumes, trinkets and ceramics; a veritable feast of visual stimuli that the artist had amassed over the course of his life.
Not long after he had moved in, Picasso turned to his new surroundings as the subject for his art. In October 1955, he painted eleven depictions that, like the present work, take a corner of the studio and one of the ornamental windows as their subject. As the artist’s friend, the writer and critic Roland Penrose described, 'When Picasso bought La Californie, though he had seen it only by twilight, he realised that its most precious asset to him, in addition to its nearness to Vallauris, was the light that penetrates into every corner of the house. He was happy at once in the luminous atmosphere of the lofty rooms, and as he had done before, he began to paint pictures inspired by the objects that lay around and the tall windows with their art nouveau tracery, through which a yellow-green is filtered by the branches of the palm trees. Day after day he saw his studio anew' (R. Penrose, Picasso: His Life and Work, London, 1958, p. 358). Over the following years, Picasso embarked on different series, however, in June of 1958 he returned again to the theme of the studio, painting, in the space of just one day, La fenêtre de l'atelier and three other iterations of this scene.
Rendered with a single plane of luminous red, with the simplified pattern of the window and green palm fronds beyond, La fenêtre de l'atelier presents one of the most abstract depictions of this corner of La Californie. This simplification and stylisation of an interior scene is instantly reminiscent of perhaps Picasso’s greatest rival and friend, Henri Matisse. The two giants of the 20th Century, Picasso had once declared: 'You have got to be able to picture side by side everything Matisse and I were doing at that time. No one has ever looked at Matisse’s painting more carefully than I; and no one has looked at mine more carefully than he’ (Picasso, quoted in J. Golding, 'Introduction’, in E. Cowling et al., Matisse Picasso, exh. cat., London, 2002, p. 13). Matisse had died in November 1954. Devastated, Picasso could not attend his funeral, and his death greatly affected the artist for many years to come. As he had throughout his life, Picasso processed his grief through his art. Like the monumental Femmes d’Alger series, La fenêtre de l'atelier and the rest of these paysages d’intérieur paid homage to Matisse, the latter specifically indebted to the artist’s late series of Vence interiors. Executed in the late 1940s, these great, late paintings – the last major group of works he made before moving to the cut outs – were a triumphant combination of colour, spontaneous line and pattern, the culmination of a life’s work. Picasso saw these interior paintings in an exhibition in 1949, held at the Musée Nationale d’Art Moderne, Paris. Requesting to see the show before it had officially opened, Picasso must have been instantly awed by what he saw, and immediately began his own response, which he exhibited in an exhibition the following month. When Matisse learned of these plans he wrote to a friend, ‘I have been told in several quarters that [Picasso] is organizing an offensive, and I am waiting to see it. I'll let you know how the prize-fight turns out’ (Matisse, quoted in M. Billot, ed., The Vence Chapel: The Archive of a Creation, Milan, 1999, p. 208).
Saturated with rich, vibrant, unbridled colour and composed with nothing more than loose, boldly spontaneous line and decorative pattern, La fenêtre de l'atelier exudes an exoticism and decorativeness that is immediately reminiscent of so many of Matisse’s interior scenes, both still-life and figurative. As John Golding has written: ‘The La Californie studio paintings are amongst the most overtly Matissean works that Picasso ever produced and, like the variations on Delacroix's Femmes d’Alger, can justifiably be regarded as homages to his departed friend… Picasso appears to be attempting to create an environment, a spirit to which Matisse would have responded… The windows, the palm trees and foliage beyond, read like Matissean quotes’ (J. Golding, Matisse Picasso, exh. cat., London, 2002, p. 299). The studio, depicted without a model, artist or any other form of human presence, is empty save for a single, solitary chair. In this way, La fenêtre de l'atelier can be seen as a final, haunting tribute to Picasso’s departed friend and rival, an elegiac testament and visual tribute not only to Matisse’s unique aesthetic and radical style, but to a lifelong friendship that had sustained, inspired and impelled Picasso forwards on his long artistic journey.
MARIE-LAURE BERNADAC
‘I paint the way some people write their autobiography. The paintings, finished or not, are the pages of my journal, and as such they are valid. The future will choose the pages it prefers. It’s not up to me to make the choice. I have the impression that the time is speeding on past me more and more rapidly… It’s the movement of painting that interests me, the dramatic movement from one effort to the next, even if those efforts are perhaps not pushed to their ultimate end… I have less and less time, and yet I have more and more to say, and what I have to say is, increasingly, something about what goes on in the movement of my thought. I’ve reached the moment, you see, when the movement of my thought interests me more than the thought itself’
PABLO PICASSO
'When Picasso bought La Californie, though he had seen it only by twilight, he realised that its most precious asset to him, in addition to its nearness to Vallauris, was the light that penetrates into every corner of the house. He was happy at once in the luminous atmosphere of the lofty rooms, and as he had done before, he began to paint pictures inspired by the objects that lay around and the tall windows with their art nouveau tracery, through which a yellow-green is filtered by the branches of the palm trees. Day after day he saw his studio anew'
ROLAND PENROSE
Saturated with bold planes of vibrant colour and bursting with an arresting array of pattern and line, La fenêtre de l'atelier presents the haloed realm of Pablo Picasso’s studio at his home, La Californie. Painted on 15 June 1958, this intimate glimpse into a corner of the ornate, light-filled villa, situated in the hills above Cannes is one of the last in a series of what Picasso called paysages d’intérieur (‘interior landscapes’). Just a few months after he painted La fenêtre de l'atelier, he moved from this now-legendary home and studio – so immortalised in photographs it has become the artist’s most famous home – to a large and austere château further inland, escaping the ever-increasing hoards of fans and admirers who sought the great artist. First begun in 1955, these studio scenes serve as captivating visions into the artist’s world as he relentlessly explored both the act of painting itself, and his identity as an artist. Taking painting as his model, in the final decades of his life, Picasso examined with an indefatigable zeal both the relationship between painter and model, and, as the present work shows, the studio itself, immortalizing the site of his promethean artistic creation. More than this however, La fenêtre de l'atelier also serves as a powerful homage to the artist’s friend and rival, Henri Matisse, a towering figure of modern art who had died four years prior. Residing in museums across the world – including the Tate Gallery, London, Musée Picasso and Centre Pompidou, Paris – these studio paintings are among the greatest tributes Picasso made to his great friend and rival, as well as being intimate, revealing glimpses into his life. ‘For Picasso, his studio is a self-portrait in itself’, Marie-Laure Bernadac has written. ‘Sensitive to its ritual, its secret poetry, he marks with his presence the environment and the objects in it, and makes his territory into his own 'second skin'" (M-L. Bernadac, ‘Picasso 1953-1972: Painting as Model’, in Late Picasso, exh. cat., London, 1988, p. 58).
Picasso had moved to La Californie in the summer of 1955. A grand and ornate 19th Century Art Nouveau villa, it provided the perfect working and living space for Picasso, who was immediately captivated by the extravagant flamboyance of the building, attracted to it ‘partly for its Orientalist air’ (Picasso, quoted in J. Richardson, Picasso: The Mediterranean Years, exh. cat., New York, 2010, p. 27). Composed of airy, high ceilinged rooms with large, elegantly ornamented windows that looked out onto luxuriant gardens planted with palm trees, the light-filled and spacious ground floor served as a studio, entertaining space, dining room and storage area for the artist and his lover of the time, Jacqueline Roque. Never before had Picasso had such a large space with which to fill a lifetime of his art, and soon, the rooms became piled not only with his work, but papers, possessions, costumes, trinkets and ceramics; a veritable feast of visual stimuli that the artist had amassed over the course of his life.
Not long after he had moved in, Picasso turned to his new surroundings as the subject for his art. In October 1955, he painted eleven depictions that, like the present work, take a corner of the studio and one of the ornamental windows as their subject. As the artist’s friend, the writer and critic Roland Penrose described, 'When Picasso bought La Californie, though he had seen it only by twilight, he realised that its most precious asset to him, in addition to its nearness to Vallauris, was the light that penetrates into every corner of the house. He was happy at once in the luminous atmosphere of the lofty rooms, and as he had done before, he began to paint pictures inspired by the objects that lay around and the tall windows with their art nouveau tracery, through which a yellow-green is filtered by the branches of the palm trees. Day after day he saw his studio anew' (R. Penrose, Picasso: His Life and Work, London, 1958, p. 358). Over the following years, Picasso embarked on different series, however, in June of 1958 he returned again to the theme of the studio, painting, in the space of just one day, La fenêtre de l'atelier and three other iterations of this scene.
Rendered with a single plane of luminous red, with the simplified pattern of the window and green palm fronds beyond, La fenêtre de l'atelier presents one of the most abstract depictions of this corner of La Californie. This simplification and stylisation of an interior scene is instantly reminiscent of perhaps Picasso’s greatest rival and friend, Henri Matisse. The two giants of the 20th Century, Picasso had once declared: 'You have got to be able to picture side by side everything Matisse and I were doing at that time. No one has ever looked at Matisse’s painting more carefully than I; and no one has looked at mine more carefully than he’ (Picasso, quoted in J. Golding, 'Introduction’, in E. Cowling et al., Matisse Picasso, exh. cat., London, 2002, p. 13). Matisse had died in November 1954. Devastated, Picasso could not attend his funeral, and his death greatly affected the artist for many years to come. As he had throughout his life, Picasso processed his grief through his art. Like the monumental Femmes d’Alger series, La fenêtre de l'atelier and the rest of these paysages d’intérieur paid homage to Matisse, the latter specifically indebted to the artist’s late series of Vence interiors. Executed in the late 1940s, these great, late paintings – the last major group of works he made before moving to the cut outs – were a triumphant combination of colour, spontaneous line and pattern, the culmination of a life’s work. Picasso saw these interior paintings in an exhibition in 1949, held at the Musée Nationale d’Art Moderne, Paris. Requesting to see the show before it had officially opened, Picasso must have been instantly awed by what he saw, and immediately began his own response, which he exhibited in an exhibition the following month. When Matisse learned of these plans he wrote to a friend, ‘I have been told in several quarters that [Picasso] is organizing an offensive, and I am waiting to see it. I'll let you know how the prize-fight turns out’ (Matisse, quoted in M. Billot, ed., The Vence Chapel: The Archive of a Creation, Milan, 1999, p. 208).
Saturated with rich, vibrant, unbridled colour and composed with nothing more than loose, boldly spontaneous line and decorative pattern, La fenêtre de l'atelier exudes an exoticism and decorativeness that is immediately reminiscent of so many of Matisse’s interior scenes, both still-life and figurative. As John Golding has written: ‘The La Californie studio paintings are amongst the most overtly Matissean works that Picasso ever produced and, like the variations on Delacroix's Femmes d’Alger, can justifiably be regarded as homages to his departed friend… Picasso appears to be attempting to create an environment, a spirit to which Matisse would have responded… The windows, the palm trees and foliage beyond, read like Matissean quotes’ (J. Golding, Matisse Picasso, exh. cat., London, 2002, p. 299). The studio, depicted without a model, artist or any other form of human presence, is empty save for a single, solitary chair. In this way, La fenêtre de l'atelier can be seen as a final, haunting tribute to Picasso’s departed friend and rival, an elegiac testament and visual tribute not only to Matisse’s unique aesthetic and radical style, but to a lifelong friendship that had sustained, inspired and impelled Picasso forwards on his long artistic journey.