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拍品專文
Claude Picasso has confirmed the authenticity of this work.
During the early 1950s, Picasso became fascinated by Matisse's gouaches découpées and resolved to take the paper cut-out to a place that his aging friend had not--into the third dimension. As a child, Picasso had been fond of cutting out dolls, animals, and flowers from paper to amuse his sister Lola; in later years, he made paper dogs for Dora Maar after the death of her beloved bichon and paper dolls for his own children Claude and Paloma. In 1954, the year of Matisse's death, Picasso first experimented with translating a paper model into more durable materials, producing a sequence of folded-paper heads of Sylvette David that her fiancé Tobias Jellinek then reproduced in sheet-metal. It was not until 1960, however, that sheet-metal sculpture would become one of Picasso's principal preoccupations. In that year, he became friendly with Lionel Prejger, who owned a scrap-metal yard in Cannes and a factory in Vallauris where he manufactured metal tubing. The two men agreed to collaborate, with Picasso producing sculptural maquettes from cut and folded paper and Prejger overseeing the execution of accurate copies in sheet-metal. Between 1960 and 1961, Picasso worked at break-neck speed, producing more than a hundred and twenty sculptures using this technique. "I am fulfilling an ambition I have had for a long time," he told Prejger, "to give permanent shape to all these bits of paper that were lying around" (quoted in M. McCully, A Picasso Anthology, Princeton, 1981, p. 259).
Femme debout is noteworthy as one of the very few sculptures from this period to integrate sheet-metal forms with other materials--in this case, plaster. The iron planes constitute a sort of armature for the female figure, which Picasso has then built up with plaster, highlighting the contrast between the traditional technique of modeling and his pioneering procedure of sheet-metal assemblage. The plaster passages are rugged and patchy, retaining the imprint of the artist's own hand; the sheet-metal forms, conversely, are smooth and planar, the precision of their cut edges (see especially the classicizing profile, the rigid fall of hair, and the flipper-like hands) lending them a modern, industrial feel. Harking back to Picasso's celebrated bricolages of the early 1950s, in which found metal objects were bound together with modeled plaster, Femme debout represents a reflection on the process of sculpture-making itself, a fact that Picasso underscored by producing a variant entirely in sheet-metal (Spies, no. 627.1). Elizabeth Cowling has written, "Breaking through conventional boundaries of medium and genre was Picasso's forte and always his cherished ambition, and in the area of technique and materials he was at his most transgressive as a sculptor" (Picasso: The Mediterranean Years, 1945-1962, exh. cat., Gagosian Gallery, London, 2010, p. 299).
During the early 1950s, Picasso became fascinated by Matisse's gouaches découpées and resolved to take the paper cut-out to a place that his aging friend had not--into the third dimension. As a child, Picasso had been fond of cutting out dolls, animals, and flowers from paper to amuse his sister Lola; in later years, he made paper dogs for Dora Maar after the death of her beloved bichon and paper dolls for his own children Claude and Paloma. In 1954, the year of Matisse's death, Picasso first experimented with translating a paper model into more durable materials, producing a sequence of folded-paper heads of Sylvette David that her fiancé Tobias Jellinek then reproduced in sheet-metal. It was not until 1960, however, that sheet-metal sculpture would become one of Picasso's principal preoccupations. In that year, he became friendly with Lionel Prejger, who owned a scrap-metal yard in Cannes and a factory in Vallauris where he manufactured metal tubing. The two men agreed to collaborate, with Picasso producing sculptural maquettes from cut and folded paper and Prejger overseeing the execution of accurate copies in sheet-metal. Between 1960 and 1961, Picasso worked at break-neck speed, producing more than a hundred and twenty sculptures using this technique. "I am fulfilling an ambition I have had for a long time," he told Prejger, "to give permanent shape to all these bits of paper that were lying around" (quoted in M. McCully, A Picasso Anthology, Princeton, 1981, p. 259).
Femme debout is noteworthy as one of the very few sculptures from this period to integrate sheet-metal forms with other materials--in this case, plaster. The iron planes constitute a sort of armature for the female figure, which Picasso has then built up with plaster, highlighting the contrast between the traditional technique of modeling and his pioneering procedure of sheet-metal assemblage. The plaster passages are rugged and patchy, retaining the imprint of the artist's own hand; the sheet-metal forms, conversely, are smooth and planar, the precision of their cut edges (see especially the classicizing profile, the rigid fall of hair, and the flipper-like hands) lending them a modern, industrial feel. Harking back to Picasso's celebrated bricolages of the early 1950s, in which found metal objects were bound together with modeled plaster, Femme debout represents a reflection on the process of sculpture-making itself, a fact that Picasso underscored by producing a variant entirely in sheet-metal (Spies, no. 627.1). Elizabeth Cowling has written, "Breaking through conventional boundaries of medium and genre was Picasso's forte and always his cherished ambition, and in the area of technique and materials he was at his most transgressive as a sculptor" (Picasso: The Mediterranean Years, 1945-1962, exh. cat., Gagosian Gallery, London, 2010, p. 299).