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拍品专文
“You’re like a growing plant and I’ve been wondering how I could get across the idea that you belong to the vegetable kingdom rather than the animal. I’ve never felt impelled to portray anyone else this way. It’s strange, isn’t it? I think it’s just right, though. It represents you.”
Pablo Picasso.
Still-life painting had become of increasing importance for Picasso in the 1940s. During the war years, it provided an adaptable motif when the capacity for executing other genres, whether landscape, portraiture or large-scale historical or mythological works, was circumscribed by restrictions on materials and physical movement. It was is also a subject that lends itself to allegory and the treatment of the major themes of life and death. With the horizon brightening in the years following 1945, Picasso kept the subject in his broadening repertoire, as he ventured across media from painting and printmaking to sculpture and pottery.
The young artist, Françoise Gilot first entered the Picasso’s life in May 1943. In the dark days of the Occupation of Paris, Picasso had met Gilot one night at Le Catalan, a Left Bank restaurant where she was dining with the actor Alain Cuny and another friend. “As the meal went on,” Gilot recalled in her autobiography, Life with Picasso, “I noticed Picasso watching us, and from time to time acting a bit for our benefit… henever 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…” (F. Gilot and C. Lake, Life with Picasso, New York, 1964, p. 14). Over the following weeks and months, the pair saw more and more of each other, but it was not until the following year that they became a couple.
Gilot reinvigorated Picasso’s life and art; her youth and vitality ushered in a new period of intense creativity and personal contentment for the artist. Together they moved south to Vallauris, where Picasso became immersed in ceramics as well as embarking on a new, experimental phase of sculpture. Forty years his junior, Gilot was his companion until 1953, bearing him two children and frequently posing for her portrait. In 1947, the couple’s first child, Claude was born, followed two years later by a daughter, Paloma. These were halcyon years for Picasso, who relished his young family and his newfound creativity.
In what is perhaps the most celebrated portrait of Gilot, La femme fleur (Zervos, vol. 14, no. 167), executed in the spring of 1946, Picasso metamorphoses her like a modern-day Daphne into a plant or tree, a sort of hybrid still-life built through a combination of restrained color and sweeping line. “You're like a growing plant,” Picasso told Gilot in 1946, at the time he was painting La Femme-fleur, “and I've been wondering how I could get across the idea that you belong to the vegetable kingdom rather than the animal. I've never felt impelled to portray anyone else this way. It's strange, isn't it? I think it's just right, though. It represents you” (Gilot, ibid., p. 119). Using the motif of a flower or plant, Picasso was able to distil Gilot’s vitality and vivacity, as well as her radiant youthfulness and femininity into pictorial form. At once delicate yet at the same time durable and resilient, a flower was the perfect way to capture the radiant beauty and independent, resolute character of Gilot. From this point onwards, natural motifs, symbols and colors abounded in Picasso’s depictions of her, as she became an Arcadian goddess, fecund fertility goddess or the embodiment of spring.
Executed at Golfe-Juan in the late summer of 1948 after Picasso had returned from a rare journey abroad to Poland, the present work is a deft combination of tightly-sprung motif and disciplined line. The latent energy of the subject seems fit to burst from within the confines of its dimensions. Through a complex network of lines, each pencil stroke finds its place within the composition. The present work relates directly to Le bouquet housed in the collection of the Kunstmuseum Basel.
Le bouquet de fleurs was part of an extensive collection of nearly 100 works formed throughout the 1950s and 60s. The collection contained works by the towering figures of 20th century art such as Pablo Picasso, Joan Miró, Marc Chagall, Henri Matisse, Georges Braque, and Max Ernst, among others. Often acquired either directly from the artists with whom the collector, a German emigre to the US in the 1920, shared personal friendships, or through their primary dealers such as Daniel-Henry Kahnweiler and Aimé Maeght, historic figures in their own right.
Pablo Picasso.
Still-life painting had become of increasing importance for Picasso in the 1940s. During the war years, it provided an adaptable motif when the capacity for executing other genres, whether landscape, portraiture or large-scale historical or mythological works, was circumscribed by restrictions on materials and physical movement. It was is also a subject that lends itself to allegory and the treatment of the major themes of life and death. With the horizon brightening in the years following 1945, Picasso kept the subject in his broadening repertoire, as he ventured across media from painting and printmaking to sculpture and pottery.
The young artist, Françoise Gilot first entered the Picasso’s life in May 1943. In the dark days of the Occupation of Paris, Picasso had met Gilot one night at Le Catalan, a Left Bank restaurant where she was dining with the actor Alain Cuny and another friend. “As the meal went on,” Gilot recalled in her autobiography, Life with Picasso, “I noticed Picasso watching us, and from time to time acting a bit for our benefit… henever 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…” (F. Gilot and C. Lake, Life with Picasso, New York, 1964, p. 14). Over the following weeks and months, the pair saw more and more of each other, but it was not until the following year that they became a couple.
Gilot reinvigorated Picasso’s life and art; her youth and vitality ushered in a new period of intense creativity and personal contentment for the artist. Together they moved south to Vallauris, where Picasso became immersed in ceramics as well as embarking on a new, experimental phase of sculpture. Forty years his junior, Gilot was his companion until 1953, bearing him two children and frequently posing for her portrait. In 1947, the couple’s first child, Claude was born, followed two years later by a daughter, Paloma. These were halcyon years for Picasso, who relished his young family and his newfound creativity.
In what is perhaps the most celebrated portrait of Gilot, La femme fleur (Zervos, vol. 14, no. 167), executed in the spring of 1946, Picasso metamorphoses her like a modern-day Daphne into a plant or tree, a sort of hybrid still-life built through a combination of restrained color and sweeping line. “You're like a growing plant,” Picasso told Gilot in 1946, at the time he was painting La Femme-fleur, “and I've been wondering how I could get across the idea that you belong to the vegetable kingdom rather than the animal. I've never felt impelled to portray anyone else this way. It's strange, isn't it? I think it's just right, though. It represents you” (Gilot, ibid., p. 119). Using the motif of a flower or plant, Picasso was able to distil Gilot’s vitality and vivacity, as well as her radiant youthfulness and femininity into pictorial form. At once delicate yet at the same time durable and resilient, a flower was the perfect way to capture the radiant beauty and independent, resolute character of Gilot. From this point onwards, natural motifs, symbols and colors abounded in Picasso’s depictions of her, as she became an Arcadian goddess, fecund fertility goddess or the embodiment of spring.
Executed at Golfe-Juan in the late summer of 1948 after Picasso had returned from a rare journey abroad to Poland, the present work is a deft combination of tightly-sprung motif and disciplined line. The latent energy of the subject seems fit to burst from within the confines of its dimensions. Through a complex network of lines, each pencil stroke finds its place within the composition. The present work relates directly to Le bouquet housed in the collection of the Kunstmuseum Basel.
Le bouquet de fleurs was part of an extensive collection of nearly 100 works formed throughout the 1950s and 60s. The collection contained works by the towering figures of 20th century art such as Pablo Picasso, Joan Miró, Marc Chagall, Henri Matisse, Georges Braque, and Max Ernst, among others. Often acquired either directly from the artists with whom the collector, a German emigre to the US in the 1920, shared personal friendships, or through their primary dealers such as Daniel-Henry Kahnweiler and Aimé Maeght, historic figures in their own right.