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拍品专文
Like Titian, Rembrandt, Matisse or de Kooning, in the final years of his career Picasso had a great flourishing of artistic activity, during which he produced an astonishing number of paintings and drawings, driven by an unstoppable urge to create. This large sheet from 1967, featuring a seated nude woman in profile to the left, a standing nude woman in the center, a seated man next to her, and several intricately worked profiles of a woman and a man, exemplifies Picasso's ability to captivate viewers through his distinct approach to form, line, and composition. The contours of the figures serve to unite them and that the whole sheet is populated with figures seen from various angles shows how Picasso remained faithful to the principle of simultaneity which he pioneered with Cubism, the desire to grasp reality from all directions at once. The work can also be seen as a reflection of Picasso's fascination with the female form and its symbolic potential. The various representations of the woman – seated, standing, and in profile – reveal the artist's ongoing exploration of the diverse facets of femininity, from strength and sensuality to vulnerability and mystery.
Picasso’s method to overlap profiles on top of each other represents a quest for perfection, a way of attaining truth through the exploration of the whole range of available styles. And the profile he returns to here, is the unmistakable, hieratic outline seen both in the seated figure and in the abundance of faces with her almond-shapes eyes, can only be that of one woman: Jacqueline Roque.
She would become Picasso’s final lover, wife, muse, model and companion, and from her first appearance in Picasso’s work in 1954, her image permeated every aspect of his art until his death in 1973. Hélène Parmelin, a writer and friend of the artist, recalled, she ‘peoples Notre Dame-de-Vie with a hundred thousand possibilities… She takes the place of all the models of all the painters on all the canvases. All the portraits are like her, even if they are not like each other. All the heads are hers and there are a thousand different ones. All the eyes are black, all the breasts are rounded… She is that enormous nude or that delicate one, that epitome of woman or that long exposition of femininity. She is sitting, lying, standing, everywhere. She is dreaming, thinking, playing… The enormous vitality of the painter feeds on this face which is itself painting, and vice versa’ (H. Parmelin, Picasso Says…, London, 1966, p. 68). Picasso did not paint Jacqueline directly from life, instead her image was indelibly imprinted in his mind, and with her constant presence beside him her image flooded his works on paper and canvases. Termed by John Richardson as ‘L’Époque Jacqueline’, it is this period that immortalizes her presence in the artist’s life.
Picasso’s method to overlap profiles on top of each other represents a quest for perfection, a way of attaining truth through the exploration of the whole range of available styles. And the profile he returns to here, is the unmistakable, hieratic outline seen both in the seated figure and in the abundance of faces with her almond-shapes eyes, can only be that of one woman: Jacqueline Roque.
She would become Picasso’s final lover, wife, muse, model and companion, and from her first appearance in Picasso’s work in 1954, her image permeated every aspect of his art until his death in 1973. Hélène Parmelin, a writer and friend of the artist, recalled, she ‘peoples Notre Dame-de-Vie with a hundred thousand possibilities… She takes the place of all the models of all the painters on all the canvases. All the portraits are like her, even if they are not like each other. All the heads are hers and there are a thousand different ones. All the eyes are black, all the breasts are rounded… She is that enormous nude or that delicate one, that epitome of woman or that long exposition of femininity. She is sitting, lying, standing, everywhere. She is dreaming, thinking, playing… The enormous vitality of the painter feeds on this face which is itself painting, and vice versa’ (H. Parmelin, Picasso Says…, London, 1966, p. 68). Picasso did not paint Jacqueline directly from life, instead her image was indelibly imprinted in his mind, and with her constant presence beside him her image flooded his works on paper and canvases. Termed by John Richardson as ‘L’Époque Jacqueline’, it is this period that immortalizes her presence in the artist’s life.