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Lot Essay
Included in Pablo Picasso’s landmark 1932 retrospective, held at the Galerie Georges Petit, Paris and subsequently the Kunsthaus Zürich, Profil is one of an important and rare series of monumental female heads that the artist painted in early 1930. Often termed as his “bone period,” these powerful depictions of the figure saw Picasso reduce the elemental components of the human head and reconstruct them according to his imagination, as well as a host of influences both personal and private. The majority of this series are now housed in museum collections, including The Art Institute of Chicago, Musée national Picasso, Paris, and the Pinakothek der Moderne, Munich.
At this time, Picasso’s art was informed by Surrealism, the prevailing movement of the avant-garde. While he maintained his independence from André Breton’s group, his work was pervaded by a novel psychological power that aligned it with his Surrealist peers, of whom Picasso was keenly aware. In addition, Picasso had renewed his love of sculpture, fostered both by his work in metal with Julio González in the late 1920s, as well as his long-standing admiration for African and Oceanic sculpture. Along with this range of diverse artistic stimuli, Picasso’s personal life was defined by turbulence, as he moved between the blissful rapture of an impassioned love affair with his young muse, Marie-Thérèse Walter, and a growing animosity towards his wife Olga. The result of this volatile mix of emotion and influence was the creation of this series of works that stand as some of the most radical, inventive, and disturbing evocations of the female form that the artist ever made.
While the formal characteristics and iconography of the female figure seen in Profil were born out of these varied influences, it was bones that served as the primary impetus for this new vision of the female form. Picasso explained his obsession with these objects to his friend, the photographer Brassaï, in 1943: “I had an absolute passion for bones. I have a lot of others at Boisgeloup: skeletons of birds, heads of dogs and sheep…I even have a skull of a rhinoceros… Have you noticed that bones are always modeled, not just chipped out? One always has the impression that they have just been taken from a mold, after having been modeled originally in clay. No matter what kind of bone you look at, you will always discover the traces of fingers... On any piece of bone at all, I always find the fingerprints of the god who amused himself with shaping it” (quoted in J. Richardson, A Life of Picasso, The Triumphant Years, London, 2009, vol. III, p. 391).
Constructed from the same organic forms, and with a similar smooth surface and carved finish as these multipartite pieces, the present work, like others of this series from early 1930, was painted on wooden panel (Zervos, vol. 7, nos. 298-305, 420). Thanks to this support, Picasso could achieve a particular sharpness and sculptural materiality that he could not have realized on canvas. Reduced to its elemental components, the female head in the present work appears in profile, the rounded, volumetric form of her head cut away, as if polished marble or wood, on which are incised the simplified outlines of her eyes. The way in which Picasso has hollowed out the form on the left hand side of the visage to create an opening suggests the figure is releasing a silent cry, infusing this work with a powerful emotional resonance. A very closely related painting is now housed in the Cincinnati Art Museum (Zervos, vol. 7, no. 298), while another, in the Los Angeles County Museum of Art (Zervos, vol. 7, no. 299), is conversely rendered with a series of outlines and flattened planes of monochromatic color, the antithesis of the overt sense of sculptural mass that defines the present Profil.
Picasso’s contemporaneous fascination with bones led him back to the sixteenth-century artist, Andreas Vesalius, who pioneered the study of the human anatomy. His De humani corporis fabrica (1543) was filled with delicate, highly detailed woodcuts illustrating the various components of the human body—in stages the musculature, internal organs, and skeleton. Picasso had already used this as artistic inspiration in 1908 when he painted the monumental series of nude figures, also known as the Dryads (for example Zervos, vol. 2A, no. 113). He returned to it at this time, using Vesalius’s woodcuts not only in his quest to quite literally break through the boundaries of the human form and its painterly representation, but to invest his works with a darker, disquieting quality, such as can be seen in the strikingly distorted visage of the present work. This same sense of corporeal deconstruction can be seen in Baigneuse assise au bord de la mer (Zervos, vol. 7, no. 306; The Museum of Modern Art, New York), in which a multipartite figure sits upon a beach. Supposedly a portrait of the artist’s wife, Olga, she appears here with a threatening praying mantis-like mouth, as if ready to devour those who cross her path.
In February 1930, just a few weeks after Picasso painted Baigneuse assise au bord de la mer, Profil, and a number of the other heads, he took on one of the greatest themes of art history, the Crucifixion (Zervos, vol. 7, no. 287; Musée Picasso, Paris). This small-scaled yet powerful painting is often seen as the culminating work of this “bone period,” and features many of the same reimaginings of the human figure that Picasso had explored in the earlier heads. The same physiognomic construction of Profil can be seen in the figure on the left of Christ, the sponge-bearer, Stephaton, his head doubling as a crescent moon.
Profil was included in one of the most important exhibitions of Picasso’s career—the renowned retrospective of the artist’s work held at the Galerie Georges Petit in Paris during the summer of 1932. Including over two hundred works that spanned his oeuvre to this point, the exhibition was an important milestone for the fifty-year old artist. The show was curated by Picasso himself, and he chose to hang works from various time periods and styles not by date, but in an eclectic arrangement of often thematic groupings. In a defiant exultation of the artist’s stylistic versatility, seemingly disparate stylistic groupings were shown; his analytical cubist canvases hung alongside Neo-Classical works from the early 1920s, for example. The present work can be seen in installation photographs from both the Paris and Zürich legs of the show.
Profil was donated to the University of California in 1959 by Stanley N. Barbee. In 1923, Barbee, together with his brothers, purchased the Coca-Cola franchise for Los Angeles and the surrounding area. This was a particularly lucrative market and the brothers soon enjoyed great financial success. Serving as President of the company, Barbee oversaw the rebuild of the head office and bottling plant. In 1936 he hired the architect, Robert Derrah, to design a new building, the result of which was the now iconic, Art Deco Streamline Moderne style structure, which took the form of a 1930s ocean liner, complete with portholes as windows. Over the course of his life, Barbee amassed an extensive art collection, including Profil, as well as Paul Cézanne’s, Le Clos normand (Hattenville), now in the Albertina, Vienna, and Le Boulevard Montmarte, matin d’hiver by Camille Pissarro, now in The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York.
At this time, Picasso’s art was informed by Surrealism, the prevailing movement of the avant-garde. While he maintained his independence from André Breton’s group, his work was pervaded by a novel psychological power that aligned it with his Surrealist peers, of whom Picasso was keenly aware. In addition, Picasso had renewed his love of sculpture, fostered both by his work in metal with Julio González in the late 1920s, as well as his long-standing admiration for African and Oceanic sculpture. Along with this range of diverse artistic stimuli, Picasso’s personal life was defined by turbulence, as he moved between the blissful rapture of an impassioned love affair with his young muse, Marie-Thérèse Walter, and a growing animosity towards his wife Olga. The result of this volatile mix of emotion and influence was the creation of this series of works that stand as some of the most radical, inventive, and disturbing evocations of the female form that the artist ever made.
While the formal characteristics and iconography of the female figure seen in Profil were born out of these varied influences, it was bones that served as the primary impetus for this new vision of the female form. Picasso explained his obsession with these objects to his friend, the photographer Brassaï, in 1943: “I had an absolute passion for bones. I have a lot of others at Boisgeloup: skeletons of birds, heads of dogs and sheep…I even have a skull of a rhinoceros… Have you noticed that bones are always modeled, not just chipped out? One always has the impression that they have just been taken from a mold, after having been modeled originally in clay. No matter what kind of bone you look at, you will always discover the traces of fingers... On any piece of bone at all, I always find the fingerprints of the god who amused himself with shaping it” (quoted in J. Richardson, A Life of Picasso, The Triumphant Years, London, 2009, vol. III, p. 391).
Constructed from the same organic forms, and with a similar smooth surface and carved finish as these multipartite pieces, the present work, like others of this series from early 1930, was painted on wooden panel (Zervos, vol. 7, nos. 298-305, 420). Thanks to this support, Picasso could achieve a particular sharpness and sculptural materiality that he could not have realized on canvas. Reduced to its elemental components, the female head in the present work appears in profile, the rounded, volumetric form of her head cut away, as if polished marble or wood, on which are incised the simplified outlines of her eyes. The way in which Picasso has hollowed out the form on the left hand side of the visage to create an opening suggests the figure is releasing a silent cry, infusing this work with a powerful emotional resonance. A very closely related painting is now housed in the Cincinnati Art Museum (Zervos, vol. 7, no. 298), while another, in the Los Angeles County Museum of Art (Zervos, vol. 7, no. 299), is conversely rendered with a series of outlines and flattened planes of monochromatic color, the antithesis of the overt sense of sculptural mass that defines the present Profil.
Picasso’s contemporaneous fascination with bones led him back to the sixteenth-century artist, Andreas Vesalius, who pioneered the study of the human anatomy. His De humani corporis fabrica (1543) was filled with delicate, highly detailed woodcuts illustrating the various components of the human body—in stages the musculature, internal organs, and skeleton. Picasso had already used this as artistic inspiration in 1908 when he painted the monumental series of nude figures, also known as the Dryads (for example Zervos, vol. 2A, no. 113). He returned to it at this time, using Vesalius’s woodcuts not only in his quest to quite literally break through the boundaries of the human form and its painterly representation, but to invest his works with a darker, disquieting quality, such as can be seen in the strikingly distorted visage of the present work. This same sense of corporeal deconstruction can be seen in Baigneuse assise au bord de la mer (Zervos, vol. 7, no. 306; The Museum of Modern Art, New York), in which a multipartite figure sits upon a beach. Supposedly a portrait of the artist’s wife, Olga, she appears here with a threatening praying mantis-like mouth, as if ready to devour those who cross her path.
In February 1930, just a few weeks after Picasso painted Baigneuse assise au bord de la mer, Profil, and a number of the other heads, he took on one of the greatest themes of art history, the Crucifixion (Zervos, vol. 7, no. 287; Musée Picasso, Paris). This small-scaled yet powerful painting is often seen as the culminating work of this “bone period,” and features many of the same reimaginings of the human figure that Picasso had explored in the earlier heads. The same physiognomic construction of Profil can be seen in the figure on the left of Christ, the sponge-bearer, Stephaton, his head doubling as a crescent moon.
Profil was included in one of the most important exhibitions of Picasso’s career—the renowned retrospective of the artist’s work held at the Galerie Georges Petit in Paris during the summer of 1932. Including over two hundred works that spanned his oeuvre to this point, the exhibition was an important milestone for the fifty-year old artist. The show was curated by Picasso himself, and he chose to hang works from various time periods and styles not by date, but in an eclectic arrangement of often thematic groupings. In a defiant exultation of the artist’s stylistic versatility, seemingly disparate stylistic groupings were shown; his analytical cubist canvases hung alongside Neo-Classical works from the early 1920s, for example. The present work can be seen in installation photographs from both the Paris and Zürich legs of the show.
Profil was donated to the University of California in 1959 by Stanley N. Barbee. In 1923, Barbee, together with his brothers, purchased the Coca-Cola franchise for Los Angeles and the surrounding area. This was a particularly lucrative market and the brothers soon enjoyed great financial success. Serving as President of the company, Barbee oversaw the rebuild of the head office and bottling plant. In 1936 he hired the architect, Robert Derrah, to design a new building, the result of which was the now iconic, Art Deco Streamline Moderne style structure, which took the form of a 1930s ocean liner, complete with portholes as windows. Over the course of his life, Barbee amassed an extensive art collection, including Profil, as well as Paul Cézanne’s, Le Clos normand (Hattenville), now in the Albertina, Vienna, and Le Boulevard Montmarte, matin d’hiver by Camille Pissarro, now in The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York.