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拍品专文
Maya Widmaier-Picasso has confirmed the authenticity of this work.
Claude Picasso has confirmed the authenticity of this work.
Executed in 1920, Main dates from a fascinating period in Pablo Picasso’s career when he was simultaneously alternating between two artistic styles: creating Cubist compositions as well as monumental, Neo-Classical nudes and delicate line drawings in the style of the great French master, Ingres. With an effortless ease, Picasso switched between these styles, which at the time dominated the postwar avant-garde of Paris, proving his ability at consistently defying expectation and enabling him to maintain his position as one of the foremost leaders of Modern art. One of a number of hand studies that Picasso executed in 1919 and 1920, Main demonstrates the artist’s increasing interest in the volumetric, sculptural qualities with which he endowed his classicized female figures at this time. Painted with watercolor and gouache in delicate pink and flesh tones, the hand is encircled by a rich shade of red, heightening the corporeal physicality of this bodily extremity. Picasso used darker cross-hatching on the outer side of the hand and fingers as a form of modelling, creating, with the simplest of means, a sense of sculpted volume and mass; an example of his unique skill as a draughtsman.
Picasso’s Neo-Classicism was inspired by and incorporated a wide variety of cultural and artistic sources. Amidst the devastation of the First World War, the ‘return to order’ dominated the avant-garde. In contrast to the individualistic and radical styles of the pre-war period, during and following the war, artists increasingly sought to imbue their art with a sense of tradition, harmony and clarity, which embodied and reflected the prevailing ideology for social unity, patriotism and construction. Where artists had once sought to break with the art of the past, increasingly they looked backwards to Classicism, Antiquity and to the great French masters of the past. In 1915, Picasso shocked the art world by executing two portraits in a meticulously representational style in the manner of Ingres: the antithesis of his fractured and abstracted cubist portraits of just a few years before. His portraits of Max Jacob and Ambroise Vollard demonstrate the artist’s new atavistic sensibility, marking the new stylistic direction that he took. A trip to Italy exposed Picasso to the art of antiquity as well as to the commedia dell’arte, and the reopening of the Louvre in 1919 provided the artist with a further wealth of artistic inspiration, housing works by the great French masters of the past, Corot, Chardin and Poussin.
Just a few months before Picasso executed the present work in 1920, he painted Two Female Nudes, (Zervos IV, 56) a work that John Richardson describes as a “manifesto for [Picasso’s] increasingly volumetric classicism” (J. Richardson, A Life of Picasso Volume III: The Triumphant Years 1917-1932, London, 2007, p. 157). Seated upon and loosely covered in draperies, the two nudes have a roundness and firmness akin to the carved marble of classical sculpture. This theme continued over the course of 1920 and 1921 as Picasso painted a host of rotund nude women with increasingly exaggerated proportions: gigantic bodies, cylindrical necks and symmetrical faces. In his blatant and overt embrace of Classicism, Picasso created works that can be seen as an almost parodic demonstration of the sacrosanct proportions and idealism of antiquity, reworking the past to fashion his own, distinctive artistic idiom.
In these paintings, the women’s hands and feet are monumentalized and often given a particular prominence within the composition: the women are pictured with their hands clasped, gesturing or raised so as to rest their head. Indeed, the proliferation of studies of hands in Picasso’s work at this time demonstrates his particular interest in this part of the human figure, which he had studied since the very beginning of his career. In these studies of 1919 and 1920, the hands appear isolated and magnified, such as in Main, as well as alongside sketches of Cubist still lifes and studies (for example: Zervos IV, 44, 226; Zervos VI, 1366, Zervos XXX, 83), providing a clear demonstration not only of Picasso’s ability to switch effortlessly between Cubism and Neo-Classicism, but also of his intense exploration at this time into space, mass and form. Working simultaneously in these dual modes of representation, Picasso questioned how reality is perceived. As Joseph Palau i Fabre writes of the artist’s stylistic plurality of this period, “To say the same thing in different ways, in different styles, became for Picasso the essence of his manner of being, of his process of self-fulfilment” (J. Palau i Fabre, Picasso: From the Ballets to Drama 1917-1926, London, 2000, p. 154).
Claude Picasso has confirmed the authenticity of this work.
Executed in 1920, Main dates from a fascinating period in Pablo Picasso’s career when he was simultaneously alternating between two artistic styles: creating Cubist compositions as well as monumental, Neo-Classical nudes and delicate line drawings in the style of the great French master, Ingres. With an effortless ease, Picasso switched between these styles, which at the time dominated the postwar avant-garde of Paris, proving his ability at consistently defying expectation and enabling him to maintain his position as one of the foremost leaders of Modern art. One of a number of hand studies that Picasso executed in 1919 and 1920, Main demonstrates the artist’s increasing interest in the volumetric, sculptural qualities with which he endowed his classicized female figures at this time. Painted with watercolor and gouache in delicate pink and flesh tones, the hand is encircled by a rich shade of red, heightening the corporeal physicality of this bodily extremity. Picasso used darker cross-hatching on the outer side of the hand and fingers as a form of modelling, creating, with the simplest of means, a sense of sculpted volume and mass; an example of his unique skill as a draughtsman.
Picasso’s Neo-Classicism was inspired by and incorporated a wide variety of cultural and artistic sources. Amidst the devastation of the First World War, the ‘return to order’ dominated the avant-garde. In contrast to the individualistic and radical styles of the pre-war period, during and following the war, artists increasingly sought to imbue their art with a sense of tradition, harmony and clarity, which embodied and reflected the prevailing ideology for social unity, patriotism and construction. Where artists had once sought to break with the art of the past, increasingly they looked backwards to Classicism, Antiquity and to the great French masters of the past. In 1915, Picasso shocked the art world by executing two portraits in a meticulously representational style in the manner of Ingres: the antithesis of his fractured and abstracted cubist portraits of just a few years before. His portraits of Max Jacob and Ambroise Vollard demonstrate the artist’s new atavistic sensibility, marking the new stylistic direction that he took. A trip to Italy exposed Picasso to the art of antiquity as well as to the commedia dell’arte, and the reopening of the Louvre in 1919 provided the artist with a further wealth of artistic inspiration, housing works by the great French masters of the past, Corot, Chardin and Poussin.
Just a few months before Picasso executed the present work in 1920, he painted Two Female Nudes, (Zervos IV, 56) a work that John Richardson describes as a “manifesto for [Picasso’s] increasingly volumetric classicism” (J. Richardson, A Life of Picasso Volume III: The Triumphant Years 1917-1932, London, 2007, p. 157). Seated upon and loosely covered in draperies, the two nudes have a roundness and firmness akin to the carved marble of classical sculpture. This theme continued over the course of 1920 and 1921 as Picasso painted a host of rotund nude women with increasingly exaggerated proportions: gigantic bodies, cylindrical necks and symmetrical faces. In his blatant and overt embrace of Classicism, Picasso created works that can be seen as an almost parodic demonstration of the sacrosanct proportions and idealism of antiquity, reworking the past to fashion his own, distinctive artistic idiom.
In these paintings, the women’s hands and feet are monumentalized and often given a particular prominence within the composition: the women are pictured with their hands clasped, gesturing or raised so as to rest their head. Indeed, the proliferation of studies of hands in Picasso’s work at this time demonstrates his particular interest in this part of the human figure, which he had studied since the very beginning of his career. In these studies of 1919 and 1920, the hands appear isolated and magnified, such as in Main, as well as alongside sketches of Cubist still lifes and studies (for example: Zervos IV, 44, 226; Zervos VI, 1366, Zervos XXX, 83), providing a clear demonstration not only of Picasso’s ability to switch effortlessly between Cubism and Neo-Classicism, but also of his intense exploration at this time into space, mass and form. Working simultaneously in these dual modes of representation, Picasso questioned how reality is perceived. As Joseph Palau i Fabre writes of the artist’s stylistic plurality of this period, “To say the same thing in different ways, in different styles, became for Picasso the essence of his manner of being, of his process of self-fulfilment” (J. Palau i Fabre, Picasso: From the Ballets to Drama 1917-1926, London, 2000, p. 154).