Mercure: Etude pour le rideau de scène

A design for the stage curtain of the ballet Mercure, the present work demonstrates Picasso's long fascination with the theater. Mercure was produced by the first owner of this drawing, Comte Étienne de Beaumont, with music by Erik Satie, and was first performed in Paris in 1924. Gertrude Stein commented on the bold new direction that Picasso was taking with this production: "Calligraphy, as I understand it in him, had perhaps its most intense moment in the décor of Mercure...A little before that he had made a series of drawings, also purely calligraphic, the lines were extraordinary lines...they were really cubism, that is to say a thing that existed in itself without the aid of association or emotion" (Picasso, London, 1939, pp. 37-38).