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拍品专文
Executed in 1903, L'espagnole devant le miroir dates from a formative and exhilarating period in Picasso’s youth. He had moved from Paris to Barcelona, finding a city gripped by civil unrest, where he saw a controversial exhibition of drawings by Isidre Nonell at the Sala París. They depicted the city’s gypsies, degraded and oppressed, and the show caused general outrage. The febrile atmosphere was compounded by the momentum of the anti-bourgeois, nationalistically Catalan Modernisme movement. Picasso, fresh from Paris and at the height of his intensely melancholic Blue Period, captures in Danseuse espagnole se recoiffe the spirit of his recent experiences of art and reality, echoing Edouard Manet and Montmartre, the bohemian and the tragic.
The scene is a glimpse backstage; a Spanish dancer stands before her dressing table, arranging her hair. Her form is rendered in quick, deft pen and ink strokes, while the shawl which drapes her body is given texture and shape by emphatic hatching. The flounces of her dress and her heavy, dark hair are painted in thickly applied wash. The curvilinear lines demonstrate an early example of Picasso’s distinctive graphic simplicity and sureness of line. The dancer raises one arm to adjust her coiffure, the other, crossed across her body, lifts a small flower coyly to her pointed nose. She wears flowers in her hair and bangles on her wrists, and a few simple cosmetic objects sit on the table before her. Picasso has drawn this moment of demure femininity with all his characteristic humor and lightness of touch. He depicts the dancer as majestic rather than slender, investing the sensuality of her broad silhouette with a coarse edge. An elderly woman, her hair scraped back, observes the dancer with arms crossed. Her gaze is a knowing one; perhaps she is looking at her younger self and the transience of youth and vanity.
Picasso arrived in Barcelona with little money, and found a place to live amid the colorful squalor of Barcelona‘s Gothic quarter. The young artist would easily have encountered the scene he depicts in L'espagnole devant le miroir. The dancer was a favored subject of the great French painters Manet and Gustave Courbet, who used the motif to explore the quintessentially "Spanish." The subject also anticipates an intimate theme prevalent in his early paintings: the woman at her toilette. Picasso at twenty-two was a youthful Spaniard with a ferocious visual appetite, who had witnessed first-hand the decaying belle époque. Returning to Spain, he invokes in this remarkable drawing the Spanish dancers glamorized by Manet and Courbet.
The scene is a glimpse backstage; a Spanish dancer stands before her dressing table, arranging her hair. Her form is rendered in quick, deft pen and ink strokes, while the shawl which drapes her body is given texture and shape by emphatic hatching. The flounces of her dress and her heavy, dark hair are painted in thickly applied wash. The curvilinear lines demonstrate an early example of Picasso’s distinctive graphic simplicity and sureness of line. The dancer raises one arm to adjust her coiffure, the other, crossed across her body, lifts a small flower coyly to her pointed nose. She wears flowers in her hair and bangles on her wrists, and a few simple cosmetic objects sit on the table before her. Picasso has drawn this moment of demure femininity with all his characteristic humor and lightness of touch. He depicts the dancer as majestic rather than slender, investing the sensuality of her broad silhouette with a coarse edge. An elderly woman, her hair scraped back, observes the dancer with arms crossed. Her gaze is a knowing one; perhaps she is looking at her younger self and the transience of youth and vanity.
Picasso arrived in Barcelona with little money, and found a place to live amid the colorful squalor of Barcelona‘s Gothic quarter. The young artist would easily have encountered the scene he depicts in L'espagnole devant le miroir. The dancer was a favored subject of the great French painters Manet and Gustave Courbet, who used the motif to explore the quintessentially "Spanish." The subject also anticipates an intimate theme prevalent in his early paintings: the woman at her toilette. Picasso at twenty-two was a youthful Spaniard with a ferocious visual appetite, who had witnessed first-hand the decaying belle époque. Returning to Spain, he invokes in this remarkable drawing the Spanish dancers glamorized by Manet and Courbet.