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拍品专文
Picasso enrolled in the San Fernando Academy in Madrid in October 1897. He quickly discovered that the traditional teaching structure was hidebound and held little interest for him. Bored with the academic exercises, he left the academy in June of the following year and moved to Barcelona where he began to mingle with the modernist ferment around him. Although the sitter of the present work is unknown, it was drawn around the time that Picasso was executing a number of similarly sized portraits of his avant-garde colleagues in the arts, habitués of the Els Quatre Gats in Barcelona, and other acquaintances.
The founders of Els Quatre Gats were the artists Ramón Casas i Carbó, Santiago Rusiñol i Prats, Miquel Utrillo and the main proprietor, Pere Romeu. These four men were bastions of the Modernista style and initially held a huge sway over younger artists like Picasso and his friends the Soto brothers and Carlos Casagemas. However, in 1900, Picasso became competitive with these artists and with Casas in particular. Picasso was determined to outdo the elder artist who had achieved great success in 1899 after a triumphant exhibition of portraits at the fashionable Barcelona gallery, Sala Parés.
With the enthusiastic support of his friends, Picasso decided to mount his own exhibition at Els Quatre Gats and devoted the next several months to portraying his friends and acquaintances in a series of portraits. John Richardson has written, "This gallery of bohemians, hovering on the verge of a humdrum future, is a unique accomplishment. The friends to whom Picasso introduces us--macho lady-killer, good doctor, doomed poet, nice dullard, smug hack, oily sponger, café anarchist--are types who we are accustomed to meeting in turn-of-the-century fiction...but never en masse in art" (A Life of Picasso, New York, 1991, vol. I, p. 145). Picasso's friends helped with the amateur installation, doing their best to fit all of the unmounted, unframed portraits in the small space provided. Although the exhibition received mixed reviews at the time, it brought a new breath of artistic air to the art scene in Barcelona. The dimensions and style of the present lot, the application of the charcoal, the spontaneous, free and sure lines and the simplicity of the execution is similar to other portraits known to have been included in this exhibition.
The founders of Els Quatre Gats were the artists Ramón Casas i Carbó, Santiago Rusiñol i Prats, Miquel Utrillo and the main proprietor, Pere Romeu. These four men were bastions of the Modernista style and initially held a huge sway over younger artists like Picasso and his friends the Soto brothers and Carlos Casagemas. However, in 1900, Picasso became competitive with these artists and with Casas in particular. Picasso was determined to outdo the elder artist who had achieved great success in 1899 after a triumphant exhibition of portraits at the fashionable Barcelona gallery, Sala Parés.
With the enthusiastic support of his friends, Picasso decided to mount his own exhibition at Els Quatre Gats and devoted the next several months to portraying his friends and acquaintances in a series of portraits. John Richardson has written, "This gallery of bohemians, hovering on the verge of a humdrum future, is a unique accomplishment. The friends to whom Picasso introduces us--macho lady-killer, good doctor, doomed poet, nice dullard, smug hack, oily sponger, café anarchist--are types who we are accustomed to meeting in turn-of-the-century fiction...but never en masse in art" (A Life of Picasso, New York, 1991, vol. I, p. 145). Picasso's friends helped with the amateur installation, doing their best to fit all of the unmounted, unframed portraits in the small space provided. Although the exhibition received mixed reviews at the time, it brought a new breath of artistic air to the art scene in Barcelona. The dimensions and style of the present lot, the application of the charcoal, the spontaneous, free and sure lines and the simplicity of the execution is similar to other portraits known to have been included in this exhibition.