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拍品专文
Picasso drew this Tête de femme during the spring of 1909, late in the season; it may likely be numbered among the important early cubist works he created between mid-June and the end of August in Horta de Ebro, situated in the Terra Alta of Catalunya. Palau i Fabre ascribed a closely related drawing to Horta (Picasso Cubism, Barcelona, 1990, p. 136, no. 386; Zervos, vol. 6, no. 1120). In this remote hilltop village Picasso's journey toward a new pictorial syntax reached a decisive stage beyond which there was no turning back. Since bringing his pioneering Les Demoiselles d'Avignon to its final state, without actually completing it, during the summer of 1907 (Zervos, vol. 2*, no. 18; The Museum of Modern Art, New York), Picasso may have experienced moments of hesitation and uncertainty, but he had certainly travelled a long distance in a relatively short time. By the end of the summer of 1909 he was well on his way to achieving the most radical restructuring of visual form since the Renaissance.
Having virtually eliminated the narrative and symbolic impetus in his art, which had been inseparable from his work during the Blue and Rose periods and even in the early phase of Les Demoiselles, Picasso limited his subjects to those he could analyze in their most fundamental aspect as portrait, the figure, still life or landscape. He thusly achieved a new focus and intensity in his picture-making, which came from looking at things, pondering both the outward and latent elements in their structural constitution, and translating these findings into new pictorial means. Picasso had begun to work deeply within the legacy of Cézanne, who "was my only master," he later declared. "It was the same for all of us–he was like our father. It was he who protected us" (quoted in J. Richardson, A Life of Picasso, Volume II: 1907-1917, New York, 1996, p. 52).
During the spring of 1909 Picasso had begun to concentrate on portraits of his companion Fernande Olivier, which he carried forth and brought to significant fruition while working in Horta. Picasso and Fernande had been living together in his studio at the Bateau-Lavoir in Montmartre since the fall of 1904. The sojourn in Horta was the artist's second; he had stayed there first as the guest of his friend Pallarès in 1898–"Horta was where Picasso claimed to have learned everything he knew" (ibid., p. 123). His second stay in Horta was surely as momentous, not only for his own sake but for the evolution of modern art as well.
Richardson has noted that Fernande was suffering in early 1909 from a kidney ailment (ibid., p.108), from which she was still recovering when she and Picasso arrived in Barcelona during May to visit his parents, before she was strong enough to travel on to Horta. Picasso concentrated on close-ups of her head, and bust-length or seated portraits, in ordinary poses that were easy on her as she convalesced. Conforming to the favored feminine appearance of the day, Fernande had a full, somewhat plump and sensual figure, and a pretty, broad-cheeked face, apparent here, notwithstanding the increasingly cubist makeover to which Picasso subjected her attractive features.
During the spring of 1909 Picasso had gradually dispensed with the primitivist mask-like hardness and rough-hewn construction of female subjects that he had devised in the wake of Les Demoiselles. He has here modeled Fernande's head with sharply contrasted indications of light and shade, the latter applied in thin, repeated directional striations, to mark off planar modules of form. His preference for a three-quarter view was already apparent from drawings and paintings done in Paris during early 1909, depicting Fernande and occasional male subjects as well. While there is nothing realistic or specifically descriptive in Picasso's treatment of his girlfriend's eyes, nose, mouth and ears, all of these features are instantly recognizable, having been cast in purely plastic terms, which serve as summary indicators in generating the image. "[Picasso's] drawings work out the detailed faceting of mouth and nose, reducing their anatomical complexity to a series of symmetrical, crystalline facets," Pepe Karmel has written. "Picasso himself seems to have justified the rigorously geometric language of these drawings as an expression of ideal, Platonic forms" (Picasso and the Invention of Cubism, New Haven, 2003, p. 64).
By means of these and other studies done during 1909, Picasso was working toward an integrated conception of sculptural form in his paintings, which strongly projects the volumetric aspect of his subjects. The effect in the present head of Fernande is relatively straightforward and displays a classical unity and clarity; Picasso's deconstruction of her visage would subsequently turn complexly baroque, as he sub-divided planes into smaller and more numerous facets. The Fernande drawings and paintings of 1909 "constitute a tight, self-perpetuating succession of consecutive speculations about one thing," Jeffrey Weiss has observed. "In this regard the Fernande group represents an unremarked prototype for later examples of seriality in Picasso's oeuvre... The incessant proliferation of 'Fernandes' in 1909 should caution us not to address Fernande herself as a conventional portrait subject whose coordinates for the artist were biographical; multiple sequences of works each represented by similar or identical 'takes' reveal instead a process of extreme formalism" (Picasso: The Cubist Portraits of Fernande Olivier, exh. cat., National Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C., 2003, pp. 5 and 13).
By the end of his stay in Horta, Picasso had evolved in his portraits and figure paintings of Fernande a recognizably advanced state of cubism, all crags and crevices–the figure of woman as mountainous landscape, as it were–much like the rugged terrain of the Terra Alta itself. His paintings for the first time display an overall and consistent planar structure, a step that marks a crucial development in the emergence of fully realized cubism. Weiss has noted how these paintings "sustain an impression of manifest weight and depth despite the growing ambiguity of projecting and receding planes...an increasingly dispersed yet gravity-stricken density of form" (ibid., p. 15).
The experience of his summer in Horta enabled Picasso when he returned to Paris in September to begin modeling Tête de femme (Fernande), the sculptural synthesis of his analytical research and formal exploration thus far (Zervos, vol. 2**, no. 573; Spies, no. 24). The artist translated the effect of faceting in his drawings and canvases into three dimensions, where it is perceived as the interaction between tangible physical mass and void. Werner Spies has pointed out that the plaster head of Fernande "remained an isolated work, representing a stylistic phase marked by a balance between the preservation and dissolution of form" (Picasso: The Sculpture, Ostfildern-Ruit, 2000, p. 65). It seems fitting that an actual sculpture should mark the culmination of this sculptural phase in Picasso's early cubism. "Picasso's faceted figures of 1909 have a monumental quality that recalls Cézanne's card players or the figures of the Italian 'Primitives'," Karmel has stated. "After the dematerialization of form in Impressionism, and the flattening of form in Post-Impressionism, this restoration of a sense of sculptural solidity (without a return to conventional realism) was a major achievement" (op. cit., 2003, p. 13). Picasso had triumphantly attained at this stage, as Pierre Daix declared, "a new kind of beauty" (Picasso: Life and Art, New York, 1993, p. 97).
Artist Photo Portrait of Fernande Oliver with one of Manuel Pallarès' nephews 1909. Photograph by Picasso. Musée Picasso, Paris; Archives Picasso. BARCODE: 28864042
Fig. A Pablo Picasso, Buste de femme, Horta de Ebro, summer 1909. The Art Institute of Chicago. BARCODE: 28864059
Fig. B Pablo Picasso, Femme au bouquet, Horta de Ebro, summer 1909. Sprengel Museum, Hannover. BARCODE: 28864066
Fig. C Pablo Picasso, Tête de femme (Fernande), Paris, autumn 1909. Raymond and Patsy Nasher Collection, Nasher Sculpture Center, Dallas. BARCODE: 28864080
Fig. D Pablo Picasso, Femme en vert, Paris, fall-winter 1909-1910. Van Abbemuseum, Eindhoven. BARCODE: 28864073
Having virtually eliminated the narrative and symbolic impetus in his art, which had been inseparable from his work during the Blue and Rose periods and even in the early phase of Les Demoiselles, Picasso limited his subjects to those he could analyze in their most fundamental aspect as portrait, the figure, still life or landscape. He thusly achieved a new focus and intensity in his picture-making, which came from looking at things, pondering both the outward and latent elements in their structural constitution, and translating these findings into new pictorial means. Picasso had begun to work deeply within the legacy of Cézanne, who "was my only master," he later declared. "It was the same for all of us–he was like our father. It was he who protected us" (quoted in J. Richardson, A Life of Picasso, Volume II: 1907-1917, New York, 1996, p. 52).
During the spring of 1909 Picasso had begun to concentrate on portraits of his companion Fernande Olivier, which he carried forth and brought to significant fruition while working in Horta. Picasso and Fernande had been living together in his studio at the Bateau-Lavoir in Montmartre since the fall of 1904. The sojourn in Horta was the artist's second; he had stayed there first as the guest of his friend Pallarès in 1898–"Horta was where Picasso claimed to have learned everything he knew" (ibid., p. 123). His second stay in Horta was surely as momentous, not only for his own sake but for the evolution of modern art as well.
Richardson has noted that Fernande was suffering in early 1909 from a kidney ailment (ibid., p.108), from which she was still recovering when she and Picasso arrived in Barcelona during May to visit his parents, before she was strong enough to travel on to Horta. Picasso concentrated on close-ups of her head, and bust-length or seated portraits, in ordinary poses that were easy on her as she convalesced. Conforming to the favored feminine appearance of the day, Fernande had a full, somewhat plump and sensual figure, and a pretty, broad-cheeked face, apparent here, notwithstanding the increasingly cubist makeover to which Picasso subjected her attractive features.
During the spring of 1909 Picasso had gradually dispensed with the primitivist mask-like hardness and rough-hewn construction of female subjects that he had devised in the wake of Les Demoiselles. He has here modeled Fernande's head with sharply contrasted indications of light and shade, the latter applied in thin, repeated directional striations, to mark off planar modules of form. His preference for a three-quarter view was already apparent from drawings and paintings done in Paris during early 1909, depicting Fernande and occasional male subjects as well. While there is nothing realistic or specifically descriptive in Picasso's treatment of his girlfriend's eyes, nose, mouth and ears, all of these features are instantly recognizable, having been cast in purely plastic terms, which serve as summary indicators in generating the image. "[Picasso's] drawings work out the detailed faceting of mouth and nose, reducing their anatomical complexity to a series of symmetrical, crystalline facets," Pepe Karmel has written. "Picasso himself seems to have justified the rigorously geometric language of these drawings as an expression of ideal, Platonic forms" (Picasso and the Invention of Cubism, New Haven, 2003, p. 64).
By means of these and other studies done during 1909, Picasso was working toward an integrated conception of sculptural form in his paintings, which strongly projects the volumetric aspect of his subjects. The effect in the present head of Fernande is relatively straightforward and displays a classical unity and clarity; Picasso's deconstruction of her visage would subsequently turn complexly baroque, as he sub-divided planes into smaller and more numerous facets. The Fernande drawings and paintings of 1909 "constitute a tight, self-perpetuating succession of consecutive speculations about one thing," Jeffrey Weiss has observed. "In this regard the Fernande group represents an unremarked prototype for later examples of seriality in Picasso's oeuvre... The incessant proliferation of 'Fernandes' in 1909 should caution us not to address Fernande herself as a conventional portrait subject whose coordinates for the artist were biographical; multiple sequences of works each represented by similar or identical 'takes' reveal instead a process of extreme formalism" (Picasso: The Cubist Portraits of Fernande Olivier, exh. cat., National Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C., 2003, pp. 5 and 13).
By the end of his stay in Horta, Picasso had evolved in his portraits and figure paintings of Fernande a recognizably advanced state of cubism, all crags and crevices–the figure of woman as mountainous landscape, as it were–much like the rugged terrain of the Terra Alta itself. His paintings for the first time display an overall and consistent planar structure, a step that marks a crucial development in the emergence of fully realized cubism. Weiss has noted how these paintings "sustain an impression of manifest weight and depth despite the growing ambiguity of projecting and receding planes...an increasingly dispersed yet gravity-stricken density of form" (ibid., p. 15).
The experience of his summer in Horta enabled Picasso when he returned to Paris in September to begin modeling Tête de femme (Fernande), the sculptural synthesis of his analytical research and formal exploration thus far (Zervos, vol. 2**, no. 573; Spies, no. 24). The artist translated the effect of faceting in his drawings and canvases into three dimensions, where it is perceived as the interaction between tangible physical mass and void. Werner Spies has pointed out that the plaster head of Fernande "remained an isolated work, representing a stylistic phase marked by a balance between the preservation and dissolution of form" (Picasso: The Sculpture, Ostfildern-Ruit, 2000, p. 65). It seems fitting that an actual sculpture should mark the culmination of this sculptural phase in Picasso's early cubism. "Picasso's faceted figures of 1909 have a monumental quality that recalls Cézanne's card players or the figures of the Italian 'Primitives'," Karmel has stated. "After the dematerialization of form in Impressionism, and the flattening of form in Post-Impressionism, this restoration of a sense of sculptural solidity (without a return to conventional realism) was a major achievement" (op. cit., 2003, p. 13). Picasso had triumphantly attained at this stage, as Pierre Daix declared, "a new kind of beauty" (Picasso: Life and Art, New York, 1993, p. 97).
Artist Photo Portrait of Fernande Oliver with one of Manuel Pallarès' nephews 1909. Photograph by Picasso. Musée Picasso, Paris; Archives Picasso. BARCODE: 28864042
Fig. A Pablo Picasso, Buste de femme, Horta de Ebro, summer 1909. The Art Institute of Chicago. BARCODE: 28864059
Fig. B Pablo Picasso, Femme au bouquet, Horta de Ebro, summer 1909. Sprengel Museum, Hannover. BARCODE: 28864066
Fig. C Pablo Picasso, Tête de femme (Fernande), Paris, autumn 1909. Raymond and Patsy Nasher Collection, Nasher Sculpture Center, Dallas. BARCODE: 28864080
Fig. D Pablo Picasso, Femme en vert, Paris, fall-winter 1909-1910. Van Abbemuseum, Eindhoven. BARCODE: 28864073