拍品專文
During the summer of 1907, Picasso brought his groundbreaking, proto-cubist manifesto, Les Demoiselles d'Avignon, to its final state after months of working and re-working the composition (Zervos, vol. 2, no. 18; The Museum of Modern Art, New York). Although the monumental brothel scene was not exhibited until 1916, word of its raw subject matter and violent primitivism spread quickly, provoking a heated discussion of ideas among Picasso's admirers and detractors alike. The present painting, completed less than a year later, is one of a rapid sequence of pictures that Les Demoiselles set into motion, ultimately leading to the emergence of Cubism--the most fundamental restructuring of pictorial form since the Renaissance--as the dominant artistic language of its time.
The defining moment in the evolution of the Demoiselles was Picasso's visit in the early spring of 1907 to the Ethnographic Museum at the Trocadéro, where the African and Oceanic art struck him as a revelation: "I wanted to get away," he later told André Malraux. "But I didn't leave. I stayed. I understood that it was very important: something was happening to me" (quoted in J. Richardson, A Life of Picasso, New York, 1996, vol. II, p. 24). In October 1907, Picasso experienced another epiphany, this time at the Cézanne retrospective at the Salon d'Automne, where two of the recently deceased master's late Grandes Baigneuses were exhibited (fig. 1). Over the course of the next ten months--before leaving Paris in August 1908 for a much needed respite at La Rue-des-Bois, in the Oise valley--Picasso worked on two overlapping and interlinked groups of paintings. The first was a sequence of Cézannesque bathers that eventually culminated in the monumental Trois femmes (Zervos, vol. 2, no. 208; State Hermitage Museum, St. Petersburg). The second, which includes the present painting, represents a continued exploration of the formal and expressive possibilities of primitivism. Pierre Daix and Joan Rosselet have written, "Whereas in the first sequence Picasso's meditations on African art resulted only in figurative simplifications and monumental rhythms within a Cézannesque framework, in this second sequence his investigations are completely dominated by them" (op. cit., 1979, p. 215).
Daix and Rosselet have proposed that Femme étendue belongs to a project for two bathers, one standing and one reclining, against a forest background (ibid., p. 219). An ink drawing is evidence for Picasso's initial conception of the composition, which he never brought to fruition (Zervos, vol. 2, no. 66), and three other panels of identical dimensions may also be linked to the project (Zervos, vol. 26, nos. 364-366). Unlike the abstract faceting of the more Cézannesque nudes of this period, however, the forms here are relentlessly sculptural, while the strong emphasis on the mass of the individual body parts is indebted to the imaginative restructurings of the human figure in African art. With its bulging musculature, spherical head and breasts, and the exaggerated torsion of its pose, the figure also recalls Matisse's Nu bleu, itself a fusion of European and African influences, which had scandalized the public and bewildered the critics at the Salon des Indépendants the previous year (fig. 2). Not coincidentally, it is said that Matisse--who had shown Picasso a piece of tribal art from his collection as early as autumn 1906--became enraged when he first saw Picasso's Demoiselles, convinced that his younger rival was seeking to upstage the notoriety of the Nu bleu.
The wooden support for Femme étendue comes from a large wardrobe that Picasso had acquired toward the end of 1907 and chopped up into at least forty panels, the majority measuring 27 x 21 centimeters. Some of these panels became landscapes and still-lifes, while others were used for studies in another unrealized figural project, L'Offrande (Zervos, vol. 2, nos. 688 and 693-694). John Richardson has written, "These meticulous miniatures, in which the artist revels in his own virtuosity, seemingly for his own private delectation, provide a fascinating microcosm of the themes and subjects and stylistic concerns of early Cubism" (op. cit., 1996, p. 82).
Picasso in his studio in the Bateau Lavoir, 1908. Photograph by Gelett Burgess. BARCODE: 28857228
(fig. 1) Paul Cézanne, Les Grandes Baigneuses, 1894-1905. The National Gallery, London. BARCODE: ART372758_DHR
(fig. 2) Henri Matisse, Nu bleu: Souvenir de Biskra, 1907. Baltimore Museum of Art. BARCODE: 28856887
The defining moment in the evolution of the Demoiselles was Picasso's visit in the early spring of 1907 to the Ethnographic Museum at the Trocadéro, where the African and Oceanic art struck him as a revelation: "I wanted to get away," he later told André Malraux. "But I didn't leave. I stayed. I understood that it was very important: something was happening to me" (quoted in J. Richardson, A Life of Picasso, New York, 1996, vol. II, p. 24). In October 1907, Picasso experienced another epiphany, this time at the Cézanne retrospective at the Salon d'Automne, where two of the recently deceased master's late Grandes Baigneuses were exhibited (fig. 1). Over the course of the next ten months--before leaving Paris in August 1908 for a much needed respite at La Rue-des-Bois, in the Oise valley--Picasso worked on two overlapping and interlinked groups of paintings. The first was a sequence of Cézannesque bathers that eventually culminated in the monumental Trois femmes (Zervos, vol. 2, no. 208; State Hermitage Museum, St. Petersburg). The second, which includes the present painting, represents a continued exploration of the formal and expressive possibilities of primitivism. Pierre Daix and Joan Rosselet have written, "Whereas in the first sequence Picasso's meditations on African art resulted only in figurative simplifications and monumental rhythms within a Cézannesque framework, in this second sequence his investigations are completely dominated by them" (op. cit., 1979, p. 215).
Daix and Rosselet have proposed that Femme étendue belongs to a project for two bathers, one standing and one reclining, against a forest background (ibid., p. 219). An ink drawing is evidence for Picasso's initial conception of the composition, which he never brought to fruition (Zervos, vol. 2, no. 66), and three other panels of identical dimensions may also be linked to the project (Zervos, vol. 26, nos. 364-366). Unlike the abstract faceting of the more Cézannesque nudes of this period, however, the forms here are relentlessly sculptural, while the strong emphasis on the mass of the individual body parts is indebted to the imaginative restructurings of the human figure in African art. With its bulging musculature, spherical head and breasts, and the exaggerated torsion of its pose, the figure also recalls Matisse's Nu bleu, itself a fusion of European and African influences, which had scandalized the public and bewildered the critics at the Salon des Indépendants the previous year (fig. 2). Not coincidentally, it is said that Matisse--who had shown Picasso a piece of tribal art from his collection as early as autumn 1906--became enraged when he first saw Picasso's Demoiselles, convinced that his younger rival was seeking to upstage the notoriety of the Nu bleu.
The wooden support for Femme étendue comes from a large wardrobe that Picasso had acquired toward the end of 1907 and chopped up into at least forty panels, the majority measuring 27 x 21 centimeters. Some of these panels became landscapes and still-lifes, while others were used for studies in another unrealized figural project, L'Offrande (Zervos, vol. 2, nos. 688 and 693-694). John Richardson has written, "These meticulous miniatures, in which the artist revels in his own virtuosity, seemingly for his own private delectation, provide a fascinating microcosm of the themes and subjects and stylistic concerns of early Cubism" (op. cit., 1996, p. 82).
Picasso in his studio in the Bateau Lavoir, 1908. Photograph by Gelett Burgess. BARCODE: 28857228
(fig. 1) Paul Cézanne, Les Grandes Baigneuses, 1894-1905. The National Gallery, London. BARCODE: ART372758_DHR
(fig. 2) Henri Matisse, Nu bleu: Souvenir de Biskra, 1907. Baltimore Museum of Art. BARCODE: 28856887