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Lot Essay
In the summer of 1946, Picasso fell in love with a new young muse, Françoise Gilot, whom he had met in 1943. In early August, they traveled to the home of Louis Fort at Golfe Juan. It was there, in August 1946, that Picasso met Romuald Dor de la Souchère, curator of the Antibes museum, located in the Grimaldi palace. He offered Picasso space in the museum for painting, but Picasso instead decided to decorate the museum itself. He intensively worked for two months and decorated the walls with twenty-two panels. The wall decoration, featuring Arcadian themes, became known as the antipolis series after the ancient Greek name for Antibes. Shortly afterward, the museum was renamed the Musée Picasso.
The subject matter of Arcadia and its inhabitants (fauns, satyrs, centaurs), embodies Picasso's exhilaration and excitement about his new love, impending fatherhood (Gilot became pregnant in August) and, most importantly, his regained freedom after years of war. Picasso's pictures and works on paper from this period thus combine the classical Mediterranean tradition with a new vision, both childlike and complex.
The present work, although titled Le combat des centaures (The Fight between Centaurs), features the battle between a faun and a centaur, and belongs to a series of drawings on this theme, executed between 21-26 August 1946. The series evolves from drawings which depict the faun and centaur facing one another, to the centaur approaching the faun from the right, spear in hand, followed by drawings like the present work which depict the centaur turned away from the faun, in an attempt to flee before the faun shoots his arrow. The next work in the series shows the wounded centaur, collapsed to the ground with the faun’s arrow through its chest, and the final two works depict the death of the centaur.
Michael FitzGerald has written about this series: “Through the remainder of 1946, Picasso elaborated the imagined and real confrontations between himself and Françoise, but, increasingly, their personal relationship became absorbed into larger themes. In August he made a series of drawings that show a pitched battle between a faun and a centaur and end with the faun standing in mourning over his foe. Yet Picasso immediately proposed an alternative: the series resumes with the centaur’s resurrection, now as a beautiful woman, whose dance is joined by the joyous faun [fig. 1]. The woman bears Françoise’s features, and Françoise’s birth sign of Sagittarius links her with the centaur as well” (“A Triangle of Ambitions: Art, Politics, and Family during the Postwar Years with Françoise Gilot,” Picasso and Portraiture, Representation and Transformation, exh. cat., The Museum of Modern Art, New York, 1996, p. 424).
The subject matter of Arcadia and its inhabitants (fauns, satyrs, centaurs), embodies Picasso's exhilaration and excitement about his new love, impending fatherhood (Gilot became pregnant in August) and, most importantly, his regained freedom after years of war. Picasso's pictures and works on paper from this period thus combine the classical Mediterranean tradition with a new vision, both childlike and complex.
The present work, although titled Le combat des centaures (The Fight between Centaurs), features the battle between a faun and a centaur, and belongs to a series of drawings on this theme, executed between 21-26 August 1946. The series evolves from drawings which depict the faun and centaur facing one another, to the centaur approaching the faun from the right, spear in hand, followed by drawings like the present work which depict the centaur turned away from the faun, in an attempt to flee before the faun shoots his arrow. The next work in the series shows the wounded centaur, collapsed to the ground with the faun’s arrow through its chest, and the final two works depict the death of the centaur.
Michael FitzGerald has written about this series: “Through the remainder of 1946, Picasso elaborated the imagined and real confrontations between himself and Françoise, but, increasingly, their personal relationship became absorbed into larger themes. In August he made a series of drawings that show a pitched battle between a faun and a centaur and end with the faun standing in mourning over his foe. Yet Picasso immediately proposed an alternative: the series resumes with the centaur’s resurrection, now as a beautiful woman, whose dance is joined by the joyous faun [fig. 1]. The woman bears Françoise’s features, and Françoise’s birth sign of Sagittarius links her with the centaur as well” (“A Triangle of Ambitions: Art, Politics, and Family during the Postwar Years with Françoise Gilot,” Picasso and Portraiture, Representation and Transformation, exh. cat., The Museum of Modern Art, New York, 1996, p. 424).