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拍品专文
This work is sold with a photo-certificate from Maya Widmaier-Picasso.
Claude Picasso has confirmed the authenticity of this work.
Pablo Picasso's Faune courant sur une plage dates from 14 December 1937 and plunges the viewer into a lyrical world of classical beasts and romance. Here, the protagonist is essentially a man who has the addition of pointed ears, horns and a tail, introducing enough bestial qualities that the viewer understands this as a character of action and impulse. Running along the beach at night, with the stars drawn in the background with deft and witty minimalism and the sea providing a dark, reflective surface captured through the use of wonderfully free scribbles and the application of wash, the creature appears to form a part of a continuing, yet private, narrative in Picasso's works.
It was a decade earlier that Picasso had begun to introduce mythical creatures into the timeless Mediterranean landscape that had featured in many of his so-called Neo-Classical works. In particular, Picasso explored the theme of the Minotaur, a flamboyant figure with an animal's head in the seat of human reason yet a man's body. The Minotaur has long been considered an alter ego for Picasso, and this theme appears to be extended in Faune courant sur une plage, not least in the obsidian eyes that this bearded figure has. However, where there was often an overtone of tragedy in the depiction of the Minotaur, sometimes presented as wounded or blinded and led by a girl reminiscent of his lover Marie-Thérèse Walter, the faun in this picture appears a liberated, joyous creature. This is in stark contrast to the mournful end of the Minotaur that Picasso had drawn only a week earlier in La fin d'un monster, now in the Scottish National Gallery of Modern Art, Edinburgh. There, the creature lay horrified, an arrow sticking through his torso, while Marie-Thérèse held a mirror to his face so that he could behold his own monstrosity. In Faune courant sur une plage, by contrast, there is a capricious atmosphere, as though the character were joyously running to some midnight assignation.
Faune courant sur une plage was created during a pivotal time for Picasso. He was gaining increasing exposure internationally - it was during this year that the Museum of Modern Art, New York, purchased his early masterpiece Les Demoiselles d'Avignon - and had also exhibited the recently-painted Guernica, displaying his horror at the civil conflict that was tearing apart his native country. On the domestic front, a similar conflict can be perceived with the continued presence of Marie-Thérèse, who still featured in many of his most sensuous pictures, and the increasing prominence that Dora Maar was having on his life. In Faune courant sur une plage, her influence may be perceived in the angularity with which the scene has been rendered, rather than the smoother, more supine curves associated with Marie-Thérèse. Here, though, that angularity has been translated into an engagingly playful tone perfectly suited to this subject from Picasso's own personal mythology.
Claude Picasso has confirmed the authenticity of this work.
Pablo Picasso's Faune courant sur une plage dates from 14 December 1937 and plunges the viewer into a lyrical world of classical beasts and romance. Here, the protagonist is essentially a man who has the addition of pointed ears, horns and a tail, introducing enough bestial qualities that the viewer understands this as a character of action and impulse. Running along the beach at night, with the stars drawn in the background with deft and witty minimalism and the sea providing a dark, reflective surface captured through the use of wonderfully free scribbles and the application of wash, the creature appears to form a part of a continuing, yet private, narrative in Picasso's works.
It was a decade earlier that Picasso had begun to introduce mythical creatures into the timeless Mediterranean landscape that had featured in many of his so-called Neo-Classical works. In particular, Picasso explored the theme of the Minotaur, a flamboyant figure with an animal's head in the seat of human reason yet a man's body. The Minotaur has long been considered an alter ego for Picasso, and this theme appears to be extended in Faune courant sur une plage, not least in the obsidian eyes that this bearded figure has. However, where there was often an overtone of tragedy in the depiction of the Minotaur, sometimes presented as wounded or blinded and led by a girl reminiscent of his lover Marie-Thérèse Walter, the faun in this picture appears a liberated, joyous creature. This is in stark contrast to the mournful end of the Minotaur that Picasso had drawn only a week earlier in La fin d'un monster, now in the Scottish National Gallery of Modern Art, Edinburgh. There, the creature lay horrified, an arrow sticking through his torso, while Marie-Thérèse held a mirror to his face so that he could behold his own monstrosity. In Faune courant sur une plage, by contrast, there is a capricious atmosphere, as though the character were joyously running to some midnight assignation.
Faune courant sur une plage was created during a pivotal time for Picasso. He was gaining increasing exposure internationally - it was during this year that the Museum of Modern Art, New York, purchased his early masterpiece Les Demoiselles d'Avignon - and had also exhibited the recently-painted Guernica, displaying his horror at the civil conflict that was tearing apart his native country. On the domestic front, a similar conflict can be perceived with the continued presence of Marie-Thérèse, who still featured in many of his most sensuous pictures, and the increasing prominence that Dora Maar was having on his life. In Faune courant sur une plage, her influence may be perceived in the angularity with which the scene has been rendered, rather than the smoother, more supine curves associated with Marie-Thérèse. Here, though, that angularity has been translated into an engagingly playful tone perfectly suited to this subject from Picasso's own personal mythology.