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Lot Essay
Pablo Picasso painted this portrait of the famed Western performer, Buffalo Bill, in the spring of 1911 during the highpoint of Analytical Cubism—the radical new pictorial language with which he and his cubist comrade, Georges Braque, dismantled every tradition of representation. Not only is this one few male portraits with identified sitters that Picasso painted in the years of pre-war Cubism, but the work provides an insight into the intense artistic friendship and spirit of shared collaboration that existed between Picasso and Braque at this time.
Chosen by Picasso to include in his landmark 1932 retrospective held at the Galerie Georges Petit in Paris, followed by the Kunsthaus Zurich—a watershed moment in the life and career of the artist—Buffalo Bill also featured in The Museum of Modern Art, New York’s major show of Cubism, Picasso and Braque, Pioneering Cubism, in 1989-1990. First owned by the legendary dealer of the movement, Daniel-Henry Kahnweiler, it has remained in the same private collection for over thirty years.
Beginning in the spring of 1910 and gaining intensity during the summer that the artist spent in Cadaqués, Picasso’s Cubism had become increasingly untethered from any kind of illusionism. It was at this time that he introduced a gridded, lattice-like structure with which to entirely flatten and geometricize both objects and the space in which they were placed. Objects were no longer discrete, sculptural masses but now open forms, their facets pried apart and rearranged into discontinuous, dematerialized structures. As Kahnweiler perfectly described Picasso’s developments this seminal summer, “He had taken the great step forward. He had shattered the closed form” (quoted in J. Palau i Fabre, Picasso Cubism, 1907-1917, New York, 1990, p. 81). The final vestiges of recognizable pictorial space were expunged as the world was reduced to an armature of overlapping, rectilinear planes, drained of color and shaded only from light to dark. “A gradual but inexorable shedding of the illusion of three-dimensionality, solidity, and fixed identity occurred,” Elizabeth Cowling notes, “as he pressed on with his investigation of the limits and potential of the ‘analytical’ style” (Picasso: Style and Meaning, London, 2002, p. 213).
Picasso—and Braque—did not want to reach a form of total abstraction however—“There is no abstract art,” Picasso famously stated (quoted in Inventing Abstraction, 1910-1925, exh. cat., The Museum of Modern Art, New York, 2012, p. 40). After the revolutionary discoveries Picasso made in Cadaqués, he began to reintroduce aspects of reality into his compositions—what he described as “attributes.” Writing about the portrait of Kahnweiler that he painted in the autumn of 1910, he explained, “In its original form it looked to me as though it were about to go up in smoke. But when I paint smoke I want you to be able to drive a nail into it. So I added attributes—a suggestion of eyes, the wave in the hair, an earlobe, the clasped hands—now you can” (quoted in ibid., p. 41). It was these often subtle figurative details, as well as the stenciled letters that Braque would pioneer at the beginning of 1911 and Picasso would soon adopt, that reintegrated a sense of life—as well as an often playful humor—into their art once more.
The present work demonstrates these developments. The figure of Buffalo Bill has been reduced to a flattened collection of lines interspersed with areas of monochromatic shading. A suggestion of the character’s flamboyant moustache is evident in the center of the composition in the form of two comma-like flicks, while his cowboy hat, jauntily-placed atop his wavy hair, which is inferred with the loosely curving shapes that fall on the left-hand side of the composition, is rendered with a simplified web of angular lines. Pierre Daix has also suggested the figure’s knotted cravat—another signature aspect of his costume—is present at the bottom of the canvas (P. Daix and J. Rosselet, Picasso: The Cubist Years, A Catalogue Raisonné, 1907-1916, London, 1979, p. 264).
Buffalo Bill, born William Frederick Cody, was an American showman. He founded Buffalo Bill's Wild West in 1883 and toured his show around the United States as well as Europe throughout the late nineteenth- and early twentieth-centuries. He famously brought the Wild West to Paris on the occasion of the 1889 Exposition Universelle, dazzling audiences with visions of cowboys, Annie Oakley, horses, shootouts, buffalo stampedes and more in this idealized vision of the American frontier. Paul Gauguin was one of many who fell under his spell, acquiring one of the hugely popular Stetsons on sale in conjunction with the show which he continued to sport for the years that followed. The image of the brave, adventurous cowboy stayed with Gauguin; indeed, on his arrival in Tahiti two years later in 1891, he was described as having long hair, “falling like a cloth onto his shoulders from beneath a huge brown felt hat with wide brim, like a cowboy’s” (quoted in G.T.M Shackelford and C. Frèches-Thory, Gauguin Tahiti: The Studio of the South Seas, exh. cat., Galeries Nationales du Grand Palais, Paris, 2003, p. 24).
In 1905, Cody’s troop returned to Paris once more and it is possible that Picasso may have visited the show at that time. Both he and Braque were already familiar with the character, known in France as “Guillaume Buffalo,” having avidly read the adventure novels, and could not have failed to see the recognizable profile of Cody in the proliferation of posters that adorned Paris’s streets in advance of and during the show’s run. Picasso was intrigued by the idea of the American far west—in 1912 he told Kahnweiler about a young American girl with the last name, “Bill,” who had written to him. “Is this the daughter of Buffalo Bill?” he asked his dealer (quoted in W. Rubin, Picasso and Braque, Pioneering Cubism, exh. cat., The Museum of Modern Art, New York, 1989, p. 50). The American journalist, Janet Flanner, recalled that Braque reminded both Picasso and their friend, Guillaume Apollinaire, of the “Le Far West” (quoted in ibid., p. 374). A reflection of the pair’s fascination with this far-off world is reflected in the playful ending Picasso sometimes used in his letters to Braque, in which he signed himself off as “ton pard,” a shortening of Buffalo Bill’s oft-used term for his sidekick, “pardner” (partner).
At the time that Picasso painted the present portrait, the two artists were in the closest possible touch, their work becoming increasingly indistinguishable from each other—as Picasso later told Françoise Gilot, “Almost every evening, either I went to Braque’s studio or Braque came to mine. Each of us had to see what the other had done during the day. We criticized each other’s work. A canvas wasn’t finished unless both of us felt it was” (quoted in J. Richardson, Life of Picasso, 1907 1917: The Painter of Modern Life, London, 2009, vol. II, p. 190). As such, the playful inference of their partnership made through the heroic world of Buffalo Bill—in many ways akin to Picasso’s nickname for Braque, “Wilbourg,” a reference to one half of the pioneering aviator brothers, Wilbur and Orville Wright—is a reflection of the sense of camaraderie and shared adventure that defines these heady years of intense artistic discovery.
Two years after Picasso painted Buffalo Bill, Braque seems also to have referred to the character in relation to their artistic partnership in his papier-collé, Le Programme (Tivoli-Cinéma) (Sammlung Rosengart, Lucerne), which includes amid the multi-layered composition a cinema program with the words “COW-BOY,” and, cleverly cropped further down, “PARDO,”—a reference to Buffalo Bill and the artist’s own partner, Picasso.
Picasso’s depiction of Buffalo Bill reflects what William Rubin has described as, a “lifelong curiosity about the frontier mentality of America” (exh. cat., op. cit., p. 52). In many ways this portrait illustrates the artist’s continued preoccupation with the portrayal of male characters in his art—many of which he used as a stand-in for himself. From the harlequin and the minotaur, to the sailor, and perhaps most famously, the musketeer, these heroic—or indeed, flawed—characters emerged at various points of Picasso’s career, often as a reflection of his own biographical situation at that time. In 1958, many years after he painted this portrait of Buffalo Bill, Picasso posed in his home, La Californie, in Cannes, sporting the cowboy hat and brandishing the holster and gun of the famed Western star and Hollywood actor, Gary Cooper, who had on occasion visited the artist. Wearing his signature blue and white striped Breton shirt, Picasso, it seemed, had finally become the figure of “Guillaume Buffalo.”
Chosen by Picasso to include in his landmark 1932 retrospective held at the Galerie Georges Petit in Paris, followed by the Kunsthaus Zurich—a watershed moment in the life and career of the artist—Buffalo Bill also featured in The Museum of Modern Art, New York’s major show of Cubism, Picasso and Braque, Pioneering Cubism, in 1989-1990. First owned by the legendary dealer of the movement, Daniel-Henry Kahnweiler, it has remained in the same private collection for over thirty years.
Beginning in the spring of 1910 and gaining intensity during the summer that the artist spent in Cadaqués, Picasso’s Cubism had become increasingly untethered from any kind of illusionism. It was at this time that he introduced a gridded, lattice-like structure with which to entirely flatten and geometricize both objects and the space in which they were placed. Objects were no longer discrete, sculptural masses but now open forms, their facets pried apart and rearranged into discontinuous, dematerialized structures. As Kahnweiler perfectly described Picasso’s developments this seminal summer, “He had taken the great step forward. He had shattered the closed form” (quoted in J. Palau i Fabre, Picasso Cubism, 1907-1917, New York, 1990, p. 81). The final vestiges of recognizable pictorial space were expunged as the world was reduced to an armature of overlapping, rectilinear planes, drained of color and shaded only from light to dark. “A gradual but inexorable shedding of the illusion of three-dimensionality, solidity, and fixed identity occurred,” Elizabeth Cowling notes, “as he pressed on with his investigation of the limits and potential of the ‘analytical’ style” (Picasso: Style and Meaning, London, 2002, p. 213).
Picasso—and Braque—did not want to reach a form of total abstraction however—“There is no abstract art,” Picasso famously stated (quoted in Inventing Abstraction, 1910-1925, exh. cat., The Museum of Modern Art, New York, 2012, p. 40). After the revolutionary discoveries Picasso made in Cadaqués, he began to reintroduce aspects of reality into his compositions—what he described as “attributes.” Writing about the portrait of Kahnweiler that he painted in the autumn of 1910, he explained, “In its original form it looked to me as though it were about to go up in smoke. But when I paint smoke I want you to be able to drive a nail into it. So I added attributes—a suggestion of eyes, the wave in the hair, an earlobe, the clasped hands—now you can” (quoted in ibid., p. 41). It was these often subtle figurative details, as well as the stenciled letters that Braque would pioneer at the beginning of 1911 and Picasso would soon adopt, that reintegrated a sense of life—as well as an often playful humor—into their art once more.
The present work demonstrates these developments. The figure of Buffalo Bill has been reduced to a flattened collection of lines interspersed with areas of monochromatic shading. A suggestion of the character’s flamboyant moustache is evident in the center of the composition in the form of two comma-like flicks, while his cowboy hat, jauntily-placed atop his wavy hair, which is inferred with the loosely curving shapes that fall on the left-hand side of the composition, is rendered with a simplified web of angular lines. Pierre Daix has also suggested the figure’s knotted cravat—another signature aspect of his costume—is present at the bottom of the canvas (P. Daix and J. Rosselet, Picasso: The Cubist Years, A Catalogue Raisonné, 1907-1916, London, 1979, p. 264).
Buffalo Bill, born William Frederick Cody, was an American showman. He founded Buffalo Bill's Wild West in 1883 and toured his show around the United States as well as Europe throughout the late nineteenth- and early twentieth-centuries. He famously brought the Wild West to Paris on the occasion of the 1889 Exposition Universelle, dazzling audiences with visions of cowboys, Annie Oakley, horses, shootouts, buffalo stampedes and more in this idealized vision of the American frontier. Paul Gauguin was one of many who fell under his spell, acquiring one of the hugely popular Stetsons on sale in conjunction with the show which he continued to sport for the years that followed. The image of the brave, adventurous cowboy stayed with Gauguin; indeed, on his arrival in Tahiti two years later in 1891, he was described as having long hair, “falling like a cloth onto his shoulders from beneath a huge brown felt hat with wide brim, like a cowboy’s” (quoted in G.T.M Shackelford and C. Frèches-Thory, Gauguin Tahiti: The Studio of the South Seas, exh. cat., Galeries Nationales du Grand Palais, Paris, 2003, p. 24).
In 1905, Cody’s troop returned to Paris once more and it is possible that Picasso may have visited the show at that time. Both he and Braque were already familiar with the character, known in France as “Guillaume Buffalo,” having avidly read the adventure novels, and could not have failed to see the recognizable profile of Cody in the proliferation of posters that adorned Paris’s streets in advance of and during the show’s run. Picasso was intrigued by the idea of the American far west—in 1912 he told Kahnweiler about a young American girl with the last name, “Bill,” who had written to him. “Is this the daughter of Buffalo Bill?” he asked his dealer (quoted in W. Rubin, Picasso and Braque, Pioneering Cubism, exh. cat., The Museum of Modern Art, New York, 1989, p. 50). The American journalist, Janet Flanner, recalled that Braque reminded both Picasso and their friend, Guillaume Apollinaire, of the “Le Far West” (quoted in ibid., p. 374). A reflection of the pair’s fascination with this far-off world is reflected in the playful ending Picasso sometimes used in his letters to Braque, in which he signed himself off as “ton pard,” a shortening of Buffalo Bill’s oft-used term for his sidekick, “pardner” (partner).
At the time that Picasso painted the present portrait, the two artists were in the closest possible touch, their work becoming increasingly indistinguishable from each other—as Picasso later told Françoise Gilot, “Almost every evening, either I went to Braque’s studio or Braque came to mine. Each of us had to see what the other had done during the day. We criticized each other’s work. A canvas wasn’t finished unless both of us felt it was” (quoted in J. Richardson, Life of Picasso, 1907 1917: The Painter of Modern Life, London, 2009, vol. II, p. 190). As such, the playful inference of their partnership made through the heroic world of Buffalo Bill—in many ways akin to Picasso’s nickname for Braque, “Wilbourg,” a reference to one half of the pioneering aviator brothers, Wilbur and Orville Wright—is a reflection of the sense of camaraderie and shared adventure that defines these heady years of intense artistic discovery.
Two years after Picasso painted Buffalo Bill, Braque seems also to have referred to the character in relation to their artistic partnership in his papier-collé, Le Programme (Tivoli-Cinéma) (Sammlung Rosengart, Lucerne), which includes amid the multi-layered composition a cinema program with the words “COW-BOY,” and, cleverly cropped further down, “PARDO,”—a reference to Buffalo Bill and the artist’s own partner, Picasso.
Picasso’s depiction of Buffalo Bill reflects what William Rubin has described as, a “lifelong curiosity about the frontier mentality of America” (exh. cat., op. cit., p. 52). In many ways this portrait illustrates the artist’s continued preoccupation with the portrayal of male characters in his art—many of which he used as a stand-in for himself. From the harlequin and the minotaur, to the sailor, and perhaps most famously, the musketeer, these heroic—or indeed, flawed—characters emerged at various points of Picasso’s career, often as a reflection of his own biographical situation at that time. In 1958, many years after he painted this portrait of Buffalo Bill, Picasso posed in his home, La Californie, in Cannes, sporting the cowboy hat and brandishing the holster and gun of the famed Western star and Hollywood actor, Gary Cooper, who had on occasion visited the artist. Wearing his signature blue and white striped Breton shirt, Picasso, it seemed, had finally become the figure of “Guillaume Buffalo.”