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拍品专文
Previously held in the collection of the Museum of Modern Art, New York, Le miroir was painted on 23 June 1947, an idyllic period of peace, happiness and new love in the life of Pablo Picasso. At this time, Picasso was enjoying a long summer sojourn with his young lover, Françoise Gilot and their new baby, Claude, in Golfe-Juan, a tranquil town on the sun-drenched Côte d’Azur. This was a moment of joyous creativity for Picasso. The dark, angst-filled days of the war were over, and the artist was once more able to travel to the south, the place he adored. Falling under the spell of classical mythology again and rejuvenated by the bright light of the Mediterranean, Picasso painted with a renewed sense of optimism, his spirits revived and his art filled with light, colour and a heady sense of joie de vivre. As it had during the Occupation, the still-life remained central to Picasso’s art of this immediate post-war period. Yet, as Le miroir exemplifies, the dark, tormented and often claustrophobic tension that characterised these works has gone, replaced instead by glorious, light-filled and increasingly minimal compositions that are defined by pared down planes of pure colour and harmonious line.
Beneath the round, amorphous blue orb of a mirror – so reduced in form that its identity is indicated thanks only to the title of the work and the nail that Picasso has playfully painted at the top of its striking black frame – a glass and a bowl of cherries are the subject of Le miroir. The motif of a bowl filled with cherries appeared in Picasso’s still-lifes from 1943 onward. In May of this year, Picasso had met a young artist, Françoise Gilot while they were both at Le Catalan, a restaurant near Picasso’s studio on the rue des Grands Augustins in Paris. Picasso, who was with his current lover and muse, Dora Maar, asked Gilot’s dining companion, the actor Alain Cuny, to introduce him to the young painter, bringing a bowl of cherries to their table.
Gilot later recalled their first encounter: ‘As the meal went on I noticed Picasso watching us, and from time to time acting a bit for our benefit… Whenever he said something particularly amusing, he smiled at us rather than just at his dinner companions. Finally, he got up and came over to our table. He brought with him a bowl of cherries and offered some to all of us, in his strong Spanish accent, calling them cerisses, with a soft, double-s sound’ (F. Gilot and C. Lake, Life with Picasso, New York, 1964, p. 14). Picasso was immediately taken by Françoise and invited her to visit his studio and see his work. Over the following weeks, she returned on numerous occasions, marking the beginning of a decade long romance. From this point onwards, cherries became a sign of Gilot’s presence in the artist’s life, and, with their plentiful abundance and ruby-red colour, this fruit also served as a symbol of luxury and indulgence.
Picasso and Gilot had first visited the south of France together in 1946, the year before he painted the present work. Staying in the home of Picasso’s friend, Louis Fort in Golfe-Juan, the pair spent a blissful summer together, painting and spending time on the beach, interspersed with visits to Matisse. Yet, there was one problem: Picasso did not have enough space to paint in Fort’s house. On the beach one day, the photographer Michel Sima suggested Picasso visit the Château Grimaldi, a Roman fort that had become an archaeological museum, perched upon the rocky coast of Antibes. The curator offered Picasso the use of the empty rooms and he quickly set about painting, marking the beginning of a two month stay there. Picasso was immediately inspired by the expansive, empty rooms, the blazing sunlight that poured through the windows with views of the sparkling azure waters beyond, as well as by the rich connections that the site had with antiquity. Bearded fauns and gambolling nymphs soon filled his work in pastoral, Arcadian scenes, as did images of fisherman, sea urchins and octopuses, motifs that reflected the artist’s complete immersion in this Mediterranean idyll. These new subjects were painted with a new, pared down, simplified aesthetic. Gone are the jagged lines, exaggerated or darkened colours and fragmented forms of his wartime still-lifes. Instead, objects are reduced simplified signs, rendered with planes of soft, radiant colour and webs of pure, unbroken intersecting lines, both straight and undulating.
Painted when Picasso was back in Golfe-Juan once more, Le miroir features this new, purified, near-abstract style, its simplified composition reminiscent of the luminous still-lifes of Picasso’s blissful Antibes sojourn of the previous year. Picasso has created the composition with an impressive economy of means. Anything extraneous has been removed, leaving only the essential components of this tripartite composition and the artist’s clear, assured line sweeping over the unadorned canvas. Space is quite literally unbounded, the still-life flooded with a luminous light, as it seems to float amidst the composition. Strokes of black paint indicate shadows and the solitary sweep of powdery white paint behind the cherry bowl lends a sense of volume to this radical, two-dimensional scene.
This new mode of painting was, as Picasso said to the English poet, John Pudney soon after the Liberation of Paris in 1944, a reflection of post-war sentiment: ‘A more disciplined art, a less out-of-control freedom, this is the defence and the concern of the artist in times like ours’ (Picasso, quoted in B. Léal, C. Piot & M-L. Bernadac, The Ultimate Picasso, New York, 2003 p. 359). Increasingly, Picasso focused on form, geometry and on the pictorial construction of his compositions, reducing his subjects to a series of shapes, symbols, pure lines and harmonious forms. This rigorous, purified artistic approach is exemplified in the artist’s simplified, supremely elegant Femme Fleur portraits of Gilot from the spring of 1946, and reached its culmination in the 1948 abstract monochrome La cuisine (Zervos XV, no. 106; The Museum of Modern Art, New York).
Beneath the round, amorphous blue orb of a mirror – so reduced in form that its identity is indicated thanks only to the title of the work and the nail that Picasso has playfully painted at the top of its striking black frame – a glass and a bowl of cherries are the subject of Le miroir. The motif of a bowl filled with cherries appeared in Picasso’s still-lifes from 1943 onward. In May of this year, Picasso had met a young artist, Françoise Gilot while they were both at Le Catalan, a restaurant near Picasso’s studio on the rue des Grands Augustins in Paris. Picasso, who was with his current lover and muse, Dora Maar, asked Gilot’s dining companion, the actor Alain Cuny, to introduce him to the young painter, bringing a bowl of cherries to their table.
Gilot later recalled their first encounter: ‘As the meal went on I noticed Picasso watching us, and from time to time acting a bit for our benefit… Whenever he said something particularly amusing, he smiled at us rather than just at his dinner companions. Finally, he got up and came over to our table. He brought with him a bowl of cherries and offered some to all of us, in his strong Spanish accent, calling them cerisses, with a soft, double-s sound’ (F. Gilot and C. Lake, Life with Picasso, New York, 1964, p. 14). Picasso was immediately taken by Françoise and invited her to visit his studio and see his work. Over the following weeks, she returned on numerous occasions, marking the beginning of a decade long romance. From this point onwards, cherries became a sign of Gilot’s presence in the artist’s life, and, with their plentiful abundance and ruby-red colour, this fruit also served as a symbol of luxury and indulgence.
Picasso and Gilot had first visited the south of France together in 1946, the year before he painted the present work. Staying in the home of Picasso’s friend, Louis Fort in Golfe-Juan, the pair spent a blissful summer together, painting and spending time on the beach, interspersed with visits to Matisse. Yet, there was one problem: Picasso did not have enough space to paint in Fort’s house. On the beach one day, the photographer Michel Sima suggested Picasso visit the Château Grimaldi, a Roman fort that had become an archaeological museum, perched upon the rocky coast of Antibes. The curator offered Picasso the use of the empty rooms and he quickly set about painting, marking the beginning of a two month stay there. Picasso was immediately inspired by the expansive, empty rooms, the blazing sunlight that poured through the windows with views of the sparkling azure waters beyond, as well as by the rich connections that the site had with antiquity. Bearded fauns and gambolling nymphs soon filled his work in pastoral, Arcadian scenes, as did images of fisherman, sea urchins and octopuses, motifs that reflected the artist’s complete immersion in this Mediterranean idyll. These new subjects were painted with a new, pared down, simplified aesthetic. Gone are the jagged lines, exaggerated or darkened colours and fragmented forms of his wartime still-lifes. Instead, objects are reduced simplified signs, rendered with planes of soft, radiant colour and webs of pure, unbroken intersecting lines, both straight and undulating.
Painted when Picasso was back in Golfe-Juan once more, Le miroir features this new, purified, near-abstract style, its simplified composition reminiscent of the luminous still-lifes of Picasso’s blissful Antibes sojourn of the previous year. Picasso has created the composition with an impressive economy of means. Anything extraneous has been removed, leaving only the essential components of this tripartite composition and the artist’s clear, assured line sweeping over the unadorned canvas. Space is quite literally unbounded, the still-life flooded with a luminous light, as it seems to float amidst the composition. Strokes of black paint indicate shadows and the solitary sweep of powdery white paint behind the cherry bowl lends a sense of volume to this radical, two-dimensional scene.
This new mode of painting was, as Picasso said to the English poet, John Pudney soon after the Liberation of Paris in 1944, a reflection of post-war sentiment: ‘A more disciplined art, a less out-of-control freedom, this is the defence and the concern of the artist in times like ours’ (Picasso, quoted in B. Léal, C. Piot & M-L. Bernadac, The Ultimate Picasso, New York, 2003 p. 359). Increasingly, Picasso focused on form, geometry and on the pictorial construction of his compositions, reducing his subjects to a series of shapes, symbols, pure lines and harmonious forms. This rigorous, purified artistic approach is exemplified in the artist’s simplified, supremely elegant Femme Fleur portraits of Gilot from the spring of 1946, and reached its culmination in the 1948 abstract monochrome La cuisine (Zervos XV, no. 106; The Museum of Modern Art, New York).