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Lot Essay
With a quizzical gaze, the young protagonist of this tender portrait appears to be Pablo Picasso’s youngest daughter, Paloma. With her hair in pigtails and wearing a bright red pinafore, her expression-full eyes and pursed lips are conveyed with bold strokes of black and white paint with lines incised onto the canvas. Rendered close up, this intimate portrayal speaks both to Picasso’s deep love for his young child as well as his perceptive knowledge of every nuance of her expression and gaze. “We never posed for my father,” Paloma later recalled. “We were too young and he did everything from memory, from his imagination. I think, especially when he had Claude and me, he became fascinated with the whole idea of childhood, with the fact that children don’t have preconceived ideas. There was a freedom to that, to the idea that for children, anything is possible” (quoted in M. Kimmelman, “Picasso’s Family Album,” in The New York Times, 28 April, 1996).
Born on 19 April 1949, Paloma was named after the artist’s iconic image of the dove that Picasso had designed for the poster of the Peace Congress in Paris held the same year. “Toward eight that evening,” Françoise Gilot, Picasso’s post-war lover recalled of the birth of her second child, “the baby—a girl—was born. Pablo had been calling from time to time from the Salle Pleyel to inquire about my progress… His famous dove was plastered all over Paris on posters advertizing the opening of the Peace Congress and when he heard he had a daughter he decided she should be named Paloma” (Life with Picasso, New York, 1964, p. 222).
Along with her brother Claude, who was born two years prior, from the time of Paloma’s birth, this dark-haired child, who was the perfect mix of her parents’ striking looks, inspired an outpouring of lovingly rendered, playful and deeply private paintings, drawings and prints that encapsulate her father’s awe and love for his new born daughter. Unlike the works that Picasso had made of his first son, Paul, in which the child is pictured in stiff costumes, or as a miniature adult, somber, posed and serious, his depictions of both Claude and Paloma show the artist completely immersed in the magic of their world.
Kirk Varnedoe has written, “Whether in recognition of a new age of permissive thinking about early childhood or out of a greater concern to absorb for himself some of the budding vitality of their youth, Picasso in the early 1950s doted on the childishness of Paloma and Claude; rather than imposing premature adulthood on them in his work, he often let their games, their toys, their own creations—as well as the mercurial intensity of their emotional life—inform his art” (“Picasso’s Self-Portraits,” in W. Rubin, ed., Picasso and Portraiture: Representation and Transformation, exh. cat., The Museum of Modern Art, New York, 1996, p. 160).
By the time that Picasso painted the present portrait in 1956, his relationship with Françoise had come to an end. In 1953, she had left their home in Vallauris and returned to Paris with her two young children. From this time onwards, Picasso was reunited with Claude and Paloma during holidays and for Christmases. David Douglas Duncan recalled one of these stays, remarking, “Paloma was different. No other child who came to La Californie radiated the same independence of character, or simmering, yet remote feeling of being already in command of her own destiny… Often she stood quietly at his side, arm on his shoulder, while he was drawing his private visions—and she would also be lost in her future dreams while comfortably hidden behind his masks. She had found herself: she was eight” (Picasso and Jacqueline, New York, 1988, p. 134).
Gradually Claude and Paloma ceased to appear in their father’s work as prominently. Following his confrontation with Eugène Delacroix and his Femmes d’Alger at the end of 1954-1955, Picasso was immersed in depictions of his new home and studio, La Californie, as well as painting seated portraits of his new muse, Jacqueline Roque. The following year, however, Picasso returned to the study of children as part of his work on Diego Velázquez’s Las Meninas, which, like Delacroix, he reinterpreted in his own vision. These paintings portray the Infanta Margarita Teresa with the same innocence and simplicity as many of his depictions of Paloma. Susan Galassi has suggested that Picasso’s immersion in this particular aspect of Las Meninas was perhaps born in part from a desire to recreate his own fractured family (Picasso’s Variations on the Masters: Confrontations with the Past, New York, 1996, p. 178).
Born on 19 April 1949, Paloma was named after the artist’s iconic image of the dove that Picasso had designed for the poster of the Peace Congress in Paris held the same year. “Toward eight that evening,” Françoise Gilot, Picasso’s post-war lover recalled of the birth of her second child, “the baby—a girl—was born. Pablo had been calling from time to time from the Salle Pleyel to inquire about my progress… His famous dove was plastered all over Paris on posters advertizing the opening of the Peace Congress and when he heard he had a daughter he decided she should be named Paloma” (Life with Picasso, New York, 1964, p. 222).
Along with her brother Claude, who was born two years prior, from the time of Paloma’s birth, this dark-haired child, who was the perfect mix of her parents’ striking looks, inspired an outpouring of lovingly rendered, playful and deeply private paintings, drawings and prints that encapsulate her father’s awe and love for his new born daughter. Unlike the works that Picasso had made of his first son, Paul, in which the child is pictured in stiff costumes, or as a miniature adult, somber, posed and serious, his depictions of both Claude and Paloma show the artist completely immersed in the magic of their world.
Kirk Varnedoe has written, “Whether in recognition of a new age of permissive thinking about early childhood or out of a greater concern to absorb for himself some of the budding vitality of their youth, Picasso in the early 1950s doted on the childishness of Paloma and Claude; rather than imposing premature adulthood on them in his work, he often let their games, their toys, their own creations—as well as the mercurial intensity of their emotional life—inform his art” (“Picasso’s Self-Portraits,” in W. Rubin, ed., Picasso and Portraiture: Representation and Transformation, exh. cat., The Museum of Modern Art, New York, 1996, p. 160).
By the time that Picasso painted the present portrait in 1956, his relationship with Françoise had come to an end. In 1953, she had left their home in Vallauris and returned to Paris with her two young children. From this time onwards, Picasso was reunited with Claude and Paloma during holidays and for Christmases. David Douglas Duncan recalled one of these stays, remarking, “Paloma was different. No other child who came to La Californie radiated the same independence of character, or simmering, yet remote feeling of being already in command of her own destiny… Often she stood quietly at his side, arm on his shoulder, while he was drawing his private visions—and she would also be lost in her future dreams while comfortably hidden behind his masks. She had found herself: she was eight” (Picasso and Jacqueline, New York, 1988, p. 134).
Gradually Claude and Paloma ceased to appear in their father’s work as prominently. Following his confrontation with Eugène Delacroix and his Femmes d’Alger at the end of 1954-1955, Picasso was immersed in depictions of his new home and studio, La Californie, as well as painting seated portraits of his new muse, Jacqueline Roque. The following year, however, Picasso returned to the study of children as part of his work on Diego Velázquez’s Las Meninas, which, like Delacroix, he reinterpreted in his own vision. These paintings portray the Infanta Margarita Teresa with the same innocence and simplicity as many of his depictions of Paloma. Susan Galassi has suggested that Picasso’s immersion in this particular aspect of Las Meninas was perhaps born in part from a desire to recreate his own fractured family (Picasso’s Variations on the Masters: Confrontations with the Past, New York, 1996, p. 178).