Tête de fou

Details

Pablo Picasso (1881-1973)
Tête de fou
signed 'PICASSO' (on the back of the base)
bronze with dark brown patina
Height: 15 7/8 in. (40.5 cm.)
Conceived in 1905; this example cast before 1939

Provenance

Galerie Ambroise Vollard, Paris.
Lucien Vollard, Paris, by whom acquired from the above.
Private collection, Switzerland, by whom acquired from the above in 1948.
Anonymous sale, Galerie Kornfeld, Bern, 23 June 2000, lot 115.
Galerie Beyeler, Basel, by whom acquired at the above sale.
Acquired from the above by the late owner in 2007.

Literature

C. Zervos, Pablo Picasso, vol. 1, Paris, 1932, no. 322, n.p. (another cast illustrated pl. 148).
J. Cassou, Picasso, New York, 1940, p. 158 (another cast illustrated).
U.E. Johnson, Ambroise Vollard Editeur, New York, 1944, no. 124, p. 114.
A.H. Barr, Jr., Picasso: Fifty Years of his Art, New York, 1946, no. 206, pp. 38 & 277 (another cast illustrated; titled 'Harlequin').
D.-H. Kahnweiler, The Sculptures of Picasso, London, 1949, no. 2 (another cast illustrated).
G.C. Argan, Scultura di Picasso, Venice, 1953, pl. IV (another cast illustrated).
W. Boeck & J. Sabartés, Picasso, New York, 1955, no. 32, p. 460 (another cast illustrated).
R. Penrose, Picasso, Amsterdam, 1961, no. 2 (another cast illustrated; titled 'Tête de bouffon').
R. Penrose, Picasso Sculpture, New York, 1965, pl. 2 (another cast illustrated).
M. de Micheli, Picasso, New York, 1967, p. 33 (another cast illustrated p. 9).
R. Penrose, The Sculpture of Picasso, 1967, no. 5, pp. 17, 26, 41 & 221 (another cast illustrated p. 52).
J. Leymarie, Picasso: The Artist of the Century, Geneva, 1971, pp. 26 & 292 (another cast illustrated p. 26; titled 'Head of a Jester').
W. Spies, Sculpture by Picasso, with a Catalogue of the Works, New York, 1971, no. 4, pp. 17-18 (another cast illustrated).
F. Elgar & R. Maillard, Picasso, New York, 1972, no. 26, p. 35 (another cast illustrated; titled 'Head of a Jester').
R. Penrose & J. Golding, eds., Picasso in Retrospect, New York, 1973, no. 206, n.p. (another cast illustrated; titled 'Harlequin (Jester)').
R. Johnson, The Early Sculpture of Picasso, 1901-1914, New York, 1976, no. 6, p. 165 (other casts illustrated p. 202).
J. Palau i Fabre, Picasso: The Early Years, 1881-1907, New York, 1981, no. 1091, p. 407 (another cast illustrated).
W. Spies, Picasso, Das plastische Werk, Berlin, 1983, no. 4, pp. 326 & 372 (another cast illustrated).
M.L. Besnard-Bernadac, M. Richet & H. Seckel, The Picasso Museum, Paris: Paintings, Papiers collés, Picture reliefs, Sculptures, and Ceramics, New York, 1985, no. 272, p. 150 (another cast illustrated).
P. Lecaldano, Picasso: Blue and Rose Periods, New York, 1987, no. 175 A (another cast illustrated).
J. Richardson, A Life of Picasso: The Early Years, 1881-1906, vol. I, New York, 1991, p. 348 (another cast illustrated).
B. Leal, C. Piot & M.-L. Bernadac, The Ultimate Picasso, New York, 2000, no. 175, pp. 85 & 505 (another cast illustrated p. 84).
W. Spies & C. Piot, Picasso: Sculpteur, Paris, 2000, no. 4, p. 394 (other casts illustrated pp. 27 & 346).
D. Widmaier-Picasso, 'Vollard and the Sculptures of Picasso', in Cézanne to Picasso: Ambroise Vollard, Patron of the Avant-Garde, exh. cat., The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, 2006, no. 161, pp. 182-188 & 392 (another cast illustrated fig. 194, p. 183; another cast illustrated again p. 392).
T. Bezzola, ed., Picasso by Picasso: His First Museum Exhibition 1932, exh. cat., Kunsthaus, Zurich, 2010, no. 74, p. 281 (another cast illustrated pp. 178 & 247).
T. Kellein & D. Riedel, eds., Picasso 1905 in Paris, exh. cat., Kunsthalle, Bielefeld, 2011, p. 104 (another cast illustrated; another cast illustrated again p. 105).
A. Temkin, A. Umland & V. Perdrisot, eds., Picasso: Sculpture, exh. cat., The Museum of Modern Art, New York, 2015, no. 3, pp. 39-41 (other casts illustrated pp. 46-47).

Special Notice

Artist's Resale Right ("Droit de Suite"). Artist's Resale Right Regulations 2006 apply to this lot, the buyer agrees to pay us an amount equal to the resale royalty provided for in those Regulations, and we undertake to the buyer to pay such amount to the artist's collection agent. These lots have been imported from outside the EU or, if the UK has withdrawn from the EU without an agreed transition deal, from outside of the UK for sale and placed under the Temporary Admission regime. Import VAT is payable at 5% on the hammer price. VAT at 20% will be added to the buyer’s premium but will not be shown separately on our invoice.

Brought to you by

Keith Gill

kgill@christies.com +44 207 389 2175

Lot Essay

The authenticity of this work has been confirmed by Claude Picasso.

‘I was really under the spell of the circus…sometimes I came three or four nights in one week’
Picasso (Reff Harlequin essay)

‘It was begun late one evening after returning home from the circus with Max Jacob. The clay rapidly took on the appearance of [Picasso’s] friend, but the next day he continued to work on it and only the lower part of the face retained the likeness. The jester's cap was added as the head changed its personality’ (R. Penrose, Picasso: His Life and Work, London, 1958, pp. 113-114). So wrote Roland Penrose describing the playful origins of Tête de fou, which was conceived over the course of a few days in 1905 while Pablo Picasso was immersed in the heady, bohemian world of Paris along with his friends, the bande à Picasso as they were known. Inspired by the poet, Max Jacob, who was by all accounts the group’s own entertainer, ‘so spirited and dynamic…Picasso and Guillaume [Apollinaire] could laugh all night long at Max’s improvisations and stories, his songs, and the faces he pulls’, Picasso’s lover of the time, Fernande Olivier recalled, Tête de fou also presents the figure of the jester, one of the leading protagonists of Picasso’s Rose Period (F. Olivier, quoted in M. McCully, Picasso in Paris, 1900-1907, exh. cat., Amsterdam, 2011, p. 177).

The waif-like, whimsical, often melancholy-tinged figures of the harlequin and saltimbanque, as well as jesters, acrobats and clowns had first emerged in Picasso’s art in the early 1900s. Living in the bohemian enclave of Montmartre, Picasso and his coterie of poets and writers were obsessed with the Cirque Médrano, enjoying the host of performers, clowns and harlequins alike that took to this famed stage. Picasso particularly identified with the itinerant commedia dell’arte figure of the harlequin, who, like him, inhabited the margins of society, barely scraping a living through his art. As John Richardson has written, ‘For all their coarseness, [circus performers] struck Picasso as true artists, like himself: wanderers who led a picturesquely marginal existence when they were not, like him, performing feats of prodigious skill’ (J. Richardson, A Life of Picasso, Volume I: 1881-1906, London, 1991, p. 371). As a result, these travelling entertainers served as the embodiment of Picasso’s bohemian life at this time, reflecting ‘the themes of alienation and fraternity, jealousy and love, that haunt [Picasso’s] imagination’ (T. Reff, ‘Harlequins, Saltimbanques, Clowns, and Fools’, Artforum, October 1971, vol. 10, no. 2, p. 32).

With his frontal, somewhat pensive gaze, ever so slightly tilted head and immediately recognisable three-pointed ‘fool’s crown’, Tête de fou belongs to this troupe of harlequins and circus performers that proliferated in Picasso’s Rose period pictures through 1905; a three-dimensional embodiment of this theme. Picasso’s use of sculpture at this time was rare; indeed, he did not have the facilities at the Bateau Lavoir, and so likely modelled this at his friend, the sculptor Paco Durrio’s studio. Clearly reveling in the expressive potential of clay, Picasso has created a richly textured surface which imbues this figure with a sense of emotional depth; a technique that could have been inspired by a large retrospective of Auguste Rodin’s work that was shown at the Musée du Luxembourg in the spring of 1905.

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