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拍品专文
Arms stretched above her head as she languidly arranges her hair, the nude figure depicted in the present work, Femme se coiffant, served as Picasso’s muse in a series of works on paper depicting this act of intimate toilette. Painted on 19 August 1952 and numbered IV, this brush and ink drawing is one of six recorded works executed on the same day, sequentially numbered I, IV, VI, IX, X, XI (Zervos vol. 15, no. 216-221). In this work, Picasso employs sweeping brushstrokes to depict the curves of this voluptuous nude, whose pretty, downcast face is crowned with a ringlet of undulating curls. The freedom afforded by the brush and ink medium is here felt in the few expertly-placed arcs used to describe the sitter’s raised arms and the curve of her left breast. Indeed, the seeming simplicity of this work belies its complex aesthetic: Picasso uses gestural lines and a Matisse-esque approach to negative space to bend and reinvent anatomic naturalism, conveying above all the sensuality of her form.
This pose runs like a thread throughout Picasso’s oeuvre. The trope of the woman tending to her hair has a long and distinguished history in Western art, dating back to classical Greek depictions of the goddess Aphrodite rising from the sea and wringing out her long flowing hair. From Titian and Ingres, to modern artists who reframed this pose in unequivocally contemporary settings—such as Edgar Degas and Pierre-Auguste Renoir—this theme provided rich stimulus for artists, and Picasso was no exception. Picasso tackled this motif with great verve over the course of his career, beginning in the Spanish village of Gósol in 1906 with La Coiffure (The Museum of Modern Art, New York) and Le Harem (Cleveland Museum of Art). A year later, this same seductive stance was once more transformed in the artist’s monumental, groundbreaking work, Les Demoiselles d’Avignon (The Museum of Modern Art, New York), in which the central figure confronts the viewer with both arms raised above her head in a pose of unabashed, unequivocal sexual power—a far cry from the private, intimate ritual in which the present nude is here immersed. In the present lot, Picasso nods to this longstanding tradition through the classically-inspired pose while eschewing classical depictions of this motif to modernize the nude.
In the summer of 1952, Picasso was still living with his then-lover, Françoise Gilot, and their two young children, Claude and Paloma, in La Galloise, their home near Vallauris. While Picasso met the young Jacqueline Roque during this time, she only entered his art in the summer of 1954, a year before they would move in together. Recently divorced with a young daughter, Catherine, Roque was working as a sales assistant at the Madoura ceramic studio in Vallauris, where the artist would frequently create his ceramics. Although the sitter here cannot be readily identified, this work is suffused with the sensuality born out of Picasso’s inspired romantic life.
This pose runs like a thread throughout Picasso’s oeuvre. The trope of the woman tending to her hair has a long and distinguished history in Western art, dating back to classical Greek depictions of the goddess Aphrodite rising from the sea and wringing out her long flowing hair. From Titian and Ingres, to modern artists who reframed this pose in unequivocally contemporary settings—such as Edgar Degas and Pierre-Auguste Renoir—this theme provided rich stimulus for artists, and Picasso was no exception. Picasso tackled this motif with great verve over the course of his career, beginning in the Spanish village of Gósol in 1906 with La Coiffure (The Museum of Modern Art, New York) and Le Harem (Cleveland Museum of Art). A year later, this same seductive stance was once more transformed in the artist’s monumental, groundbreaking work, Les Demoiselles d’Avignon (The Museum of Modern Art, New York), in which the central figure confronts the viewer with both arms raised above her head in a pose of unabashed, unequivocal sexual power—a far cry from the private, intimate ritual in which the present nude is here immersed. In the present lot, Picasso nods to this longstanding tradition through the classically-inspired pose while eschewing classical depictions of this motif to modernize the nude.
In the summer of 1952, Picasso was still living with his then-lover, Françoise Gilot, and their two young children, Claude and Paloma, in La Galloise, their home near Vallauris. While Picasso met the young Jacqueline Roque during this time, she only entered his art in the summer of 1954, a year before they would move in together. Recently divorced with a young daughter, Catherine, Roque was working as a sales assistant at the Madoura ceramic studio in Vallauris, where the artist would frequently create his ceramics. Although the sitter here cannot be readily identified, this work is suffused with the sensuality born out of Picasso’s inspired romantic life.