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Lot Essay
Pablo Picasso’s poignant and forceful depiction of Dora Maar in La Femme au Tambourin speaks to the volatility of the late-1930s, a sense worked into her twisted contrapposto pose and agitated expression. Although recognizably Maar, the image presents a portrait not of Picasso’s paramour but rather of the era itself. Executed in 1939, La Femme au Tambourin reflects the Fascist horrors fomenting in Italy and Germany as well as the last days of the Spanish Civil War. The print is part of a small but significant group of works that Picasso created in direct response to these events.
This was not the first time Picasso represented a dancer with a tambourine, but if his earlier work, Femme au tambourin, 1925, was sedate, and painted in the guise of Henri Matisse’s odalisques, La Femme au Tambourin suggests a whirring and ferocious potency: While dance so often reflects delight and even euphoria, the present work instead is bacchic. To create this vision of instability and horror, Picasso drew from several sources, including, scholars believe, John Singer Sargent’s depiction of a Spanish Romani dancer in El Jaleo, 1882; the outflung hands of Nicolas Poussin’s writhing Maenads; and, most notably, from Edgar Degas’ many poised dancers and bathing women. Yet Picasso took Degas’s tranquil contortions to their extreme, creating a woman who ‘cannot stand upright [or] keep her balance’ (B. Baer, Picasso The Engraver, New York, 1997, p. 43). Indeed, balance seems impossible for a figure whose right leg stretches out precariously even as her body flings in the opposite direction.
The emotional intensity of Picasso’s image was further conveyed through his use of muted tonalities, and the combination of aquatint and etching, which allowed him to capture both frenzied movement and precise detail, as seen, for example, in the figure’s musculature and feet. This mix of techniques is characteristic of an artist who constantly sought out the new. Indeed, by any sense, Picasso’s artistic career is one defined by transformation and change. He was an alchemist par excellence when it came to material and medium and had been experimenting with printmaking techniques since he was a teenager. Indeed, Picasso’s evolution as a printmaker closely echoes his painterly development: His earliest prints portray the figures who would populate the paintings of his Blue and Rose periods, while the 1920s are awash with Cubist innovations. But it was in the 1930s that Picasso, encouraged by the master printmaker Roger Lacourière, wholeheartedly embraced aquatint. The ‘allegorical compositions’ of these years, writes curator Calvin Brown, examine the ‘emotional life of the artist in politically tempestuous times’, and he would go on to produce some of the most important prints of his career during this period (C. Brown, ‘Picasso Prints’, Princeton University Art Museum, accessed on 16 December 2022, https://artmuseum.princeton.edu/object-package/picasso-prints/80298).
The woman in La Femme au Tambourin is easily identified as Maar owing to her wide-eyed expression, strong jawline, and the timing of their relationship. Maar and Picasso met in 1935 but didn’t begin their love affair until the following year. Maar, who grew up in Argentina, had taken up with the Surrealists when she moved to Paris at the age of nineteen. Her photographs were included in their exhibitions, and she posed for Man Ray and Brassaï before becoming Picasso’s muse. It was the poet Paul Éluard, however, who introduced the two artists, and against the backdrop of the impending war, Picasso and Maar began a passionate and turbulent affair. She was, according to Françoise Gilot, the woman who would later supplant Maar in Picasso’s life, the ‘artist who understood him to a far greater degree than the others’ (F. Gilot and C. Lake, Life with Picasso, New York, 1964, p. 340).
Picasso’s practice of subjecting the female form to radical distortions was, by the 1930s, central to his understanding of figuration, and he made Maar the object of his disfigurements. But even as his art approached abstraction, he remained devoted to representation: The body was, under Picasso’s nimble hands, an inexhaustible theme for formal innovation. Maar proved a particularly compelling subject, and throughout the German Occupation of France, and the related horrors of the war, she came to embody the notion of the victim. ‘For me she’s the weeping woman,’ Picasso said. ‘For years I've painted her in tortured forms, not through sadism, and not with pleasure, either; just obeying a vision that forced itself on me’ (P. Picasso quoted in F. Gilot, Life with Picasso, New York, 1964, p. 122). She was, he came to believe, the site onto which he could cast life’s instability, where he could map and transmogrify the precarity of the world.
This was not the first time Picasso represented a dancer with a tambourine, but if his earlier work, Femme au tambourin, 1925, was sedate, and painted in the guise of Henri Matisse’s odalisques, La Femme au Tambourin suggests a whirring and ferocious potency: While dance so often reflects delight and even euphoria, the present work instead is bacchic. To create this vision of instability and horror, Picasso drew from several sources, including, scholars believe, John Singer Sargent’s depiction of a Spanish Romani dancer in El Jaleo, 1882; the outflung hands of Nicolas Poussin’s writhing Maenads; and, most notably, from Edgar Degas’ many poised dancers and bathing women. Yet Picasso took Degas’s tranquil contortions to their extreme, creating a woman who ‘cannot stand upright [or] keep her balance’ (B. Baer, Picasso The Engraver, New York, 1997, p. 43). Indeed, balance seems impossible for a figure whose right leg stretches out precariously even as her body flings in the opposite direction.
The emotional intensity of Picasso’s image was further conveyed through his use of muted tonalities, and the combination of aquatint and etching, which allowed him to capture both frenzied movement and precise detail, as seen, for example, in the figure’s musculature and feet. This mix of techniques is characteristic of an artist who constantly sought out the new. Indeed, by any sense, Picasso’s artistic career is one defined by transformation and change. He was an alchemist par excellence when it came to material and medium and had been experimenting with printmaking techniques since he was a teenager. Indeed, Picasso’s evolution as a printmaker closely echoes his painterly development: His earliest prints portray the figures who would populate the paintings of his Blue and Rose periods, while the 1920s are awash with Cubist innovations. But it was in the 1930s that Picasso, encouraged by the master printmaker Roger Lacourière, wholeheartedly embraced aquatint. The ‘allegorical compositions’ of these years, writes curator Calvin Brown, examine the ‘emotional life of the artist in politically tempestuous times’, and he would go on to produce some of the most important prints of his career during this period (C. Brown, ‘Picasso Prints’, Princeton University Art Museum, accessed on 16 December 2022, https://artmuseum.princeton.edu/object-package/picasso-prints/80298).
The woman in La Femme au Tambourin is easily identified as Maar owing to her wide-eyed expression, strong jawline, and the timing of their relationship. Maar and Picasso met in 1935 but didn’t begin their love affair until the following year. Maar, who grew up in Argentina, had taken up with the Surrealists when she moved to Paris at the age of nineteen. Her photographs were included in their exhibitions, and she posed for Man Ray and Brassaï before becoming Picasso’s muse. It was the poet Paul Éluard, however, who introduced the two artists, and against the backdrop of the impending war, Picasso and Maar began a passionate and turbulent affair. She was, according to Françoise Gilot, the woman who would later supplant Maar in Picasso’s life, the ‘artist who understood him to a far greater degree than the others’ (F. Gilot and C. Lake, Life with Picasso, New York, 1964, p. 340).
Picasso’s practice of subjecting the female form to radical distortions was, by the 1930s, central to his understanding of figuration, and he made Maar the object of his disfigurements. But even as his art approached abstraction, he remained devoted to representation: The body was, under Picasso’s nimble hands, an inexhaustible theme for formal innovation. Maar proved a particularly compelling subject, and throughout the German Occupation of France, and the related horrors of the war, she came to embody the notion of the victim. ‘For me she’s the weeping woman,’ Picasso said. ‘For years I've painted her in tortured forms, not through sadism, and not with pleasure, either; just obeying a vision that forced itself on me’ (P. Picasso quoted in F. Gilot, Life with Picasso, New York, 1964, p. 122). She was, he came to believe, the site onto which he could cast life’s instability, where he could map and transmogrify the precarity of the world.