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Lot Essay
Picasso first saw Edouard Manet's Le déjeuner sur l'herbe at the 1900 Exposition Universelle in Paris. While the painting immediately impressed him, it was not until 1959 that he began an exploration of his predecessor's 1863 succès de scandale. Picasso's incessant reimaginings of Manet's composition would eventually come to encompass, twenty seven paintings, over 150 drawings, three linocuts, two dozen sculptures and ceramic works. The déjeuners series is among his most ambitious projects of rediscovery and reappropriation of his art-historical past: by choosing radical and innovative masterpieces, he consciously placed himself at the forefront of art making and creating.
Susan Grace Galassi has discussed the relationship between Manet and Picasso's versions, particularly their differing approaches to the female nude: “For Picasso, as for Manet, the Déjeuner offered the opportunity to reassess the central theme of the nude and invest it with new life. Over the course of his transformations, he strips away Manet's overlay of realism, and takes the female figure back to something more timeless, enduring and primordial. The female nude was for Picasso, as it was in Manet's time, the very essence of art...Its principle and its force, the mysterious armature that prevents its decomposition and dissolution. She is equated with the originating impulse of art, eros, inspiration, and generativity, and is the link between generations” (Picasso's Variations on the Masters, New York, 1996, p. 201).
With seemingly tireless energy and application, he would change the forms and even the narrative of the picture again and again. During the 1950s in particular, Picasso created a number of series of variations based on the paintings of his predecessors: Las Meninas of his fellow Spaniard, Diego Velázquez, the Femmes d'Alger of Eugène Delacroix or, as here, Le déjeuner sur l'herbe by Manet. In these works, Picasso appeared to be challenging his artistic forefathers and squaring up to their legacies. At the same time, however, there was a certain gleeful irreverence in his dismantling and serial reconstruction of these iconic images for his own purposes. In the case of Le déjeuner sur l'herbe, the sense of iconoclasm is all the more pointed as the original work had itself been based on a predecessor, the Louvre's famous Concert champêtre previously attributed to Giorgione and now often ascribed to the hand of Titian. Manet's reimagining of this image of pastoral idyll was itself a cause of great scandal when it was first exhibited at the Salon des Refusés. In reinterpreting this critical landmark in the birth of Modernism, Picasso rediscovered and merged many of his favorite themes: the artist and model, bathers on a beach, figures in an idyllic landscape, all highly charged with his distinctly modern and personal treatment of sexuality.
Susan Grace Galassi has discussed the relationship between Manet and Picasso's versions, particularly their differing approaches to the female nude: “For Picasso, as for Manet, the Déjeuner offered the opportunity to reassess the central theme of the nude and invest it with new life. Over the course of his transformations, he strips away Manet's overlay of realism, and takes the female figure back to something more timeless, enduring and primordial. The female nude was for Picasso, as it was in Manet's time, the very essence of art...Its principle and its force, the mysterious armature that prevents its decomposition and dissolution. She is equated with the originating impulse of art, eros, inspiration, and generativity, and is the link between generations” (Picasso's Variations on the Masters, New York, 1996, p. 201).
With seemingly tireless energy and application, he would change the forms and even the narrative of the picture again and again. During the 1950s in particular, Picasso created a number of series of variations based on the paintings of his predecessors: Las Meninas of his fellow Spaniard, Diego Velázquez, the Femmes d'Alger of Eugène Delacroix or, as here, Le déjeuner sur l'herbe by Manet. In these works, Picasso appeared to be challenging his artistic forefathers and squaring up to their legacies. At the same time, however, there was a certain gleeful irreverence in his dismantling and serial reconstruction of these iconic images for his own purposes. In the case of Le déjeuner sur l'herbe, the sense of iconoclasm is all the more pointed as the original work had itself been based on a predecessor, the Louvre's famous Concert champêtre previously attributed to Giorgione and now often ascribed to the hand of Titian. Manet's reimagining of this image of pastoral idyll was itself a cause of great scandal when it was first exhibited at the Salon des Refusés. In reinterpreting this critical landmark in the birth of Modernism, Picasso rediscovered and merged many of his favorite themes: the artist and model, bathers on a beach, figures in an idyllic landscape, all highly charged with his distinctly modern and personal treatment of sexuality.