A painting of heightened psychological intensity,
Pablo Picasso’s Femme au béret et à la robe quadrill ée (Marie -Thérèse Walter) brings to a climax a turbulent and highly charged year. The great masterpiece of his career Guernica was created in 1937, and in the final month of that momentous year he painted this vivid, poignant and intense image of his golden muse Marie -Thérèse Walter.
This defining work will be offered for the first time as a star lot of Sotheby’s Impressionist & Modern Art Evening Sale in London on 28 February 2018.
PICASSO’S WEEPING WOMEN: THE YEARS OF MARIE - THÉRÈSE & DORA MAAR
The women of Picasso’s life are the fulcrum of his creative genius , unquestionably essential to his creative and intellectual processes.
Femme au béret et à la robe quadrillée (Marie -Thérèse Walter) charts Picasso’s evolving relationship with his muse Marie -Thérèse Walter , to whom he was ostensibly still devoted at the time, and the increasingly dominant presence of his new lover Dora Maar. Indeed, the work appears to have been used as a means for explorin g his feelings for the two women.
There is a conscious blurring of the two styles inspired by the two muses, reaching its pinnacle in the silhouetted ‘other’ that emerges from behind the main subject. Whether it represents Maar or indeed a self -portrait, the implication is that of duality and conflict.
Picasso is quoted: ‘It must be painful for a girl to see in a painting that she is on the way out’.
The beginning of the decade marked a period of sublime happiness for Picasso, as witnessed in the extraordinarily sensual and lyrical paintings of Marie -Thérèse in 1932 – which are the subject of the current acclaimed exhibition at Musée Picasso in Paris and will feature in a forthcoming show at Tate Modern in London.
This extremely dynamic painting reveals just how much things had changed for him in the intervening five years. The work’s sharp cubistic edges, thick impastoed paint and black outlines give it an immediate visual impact – the emphatic execution and bold palette packed with emotional charge. The depiction of Marie -Thérèse has matured from the voluptuous curves and sleepy, passive suggestiveness to the woman who gave birth to Picasso’s child. The portrait suggests that she continued to be of central importance to the artist .
1937: GUERNICA & THE POLITICISATION OF PICASSO
These personal disruptions in 1937 were mirrored by wider political unrest in the artist’ s native Spain, the year marked by a succession of shattering events including the bombing of the small to wn of Guernica in Basque Spain – which prompted the grand mast erpiece Guernica and a harrowing series of weeping women. This portrait, with its green welling tears, has been identified as a continuation of and counterbalance to the sequence of weeping women : ‘[she is] entirely reduced to inner tears – a resigned sadness, nonetheless suffused with love.
Pablo
Picasso (1881 - 1973) Le Matador oil on
canvas 146 by 114cm., 57½ by 44⅞in. Painted on 23 rd October 1970. Estimate:
£1 4,000,000 – 18 ,000,000
Monumental
in scale , highly charged and painted in vivid colours, Le Matador is the culmination
of a life -long obsession of Picasso’s that remained one of the most important
themes throughout his career.
The
painting is a brilliant display of the virtuosity with which Picasso combined
the complex elements that had shaped his life and art and stands as a defiant tribute
to the heroic figure of the matador – embodying the artist’s own Andalusian machismo
as the master of modern art takes centre -stage in the arena.
Picasso
had begun to feel that his time on this earth was running out, and so engaged
in constant conversation with the great masters before him – Goya, Velasquez
and Delacroix – following the traditions they had set in order to reinvent them
and make a lasting mark .
Appearing at auction for the first time, the work will be offered in Sotheby’s
Impressionist & Modern Art Evening Sale on 28 February 2018.
The bullfight
became a symbol for the most public display of violence, bravery and ability
and for Picasso its attraction certainly lay in its powerful contradictions: grace
and brutality, entertainment and tragedy, and ultimately, life and death. This
work is unique in conveying a human dimension that is lacking in many of the
earlier depictions, with the matador’s stylised face and large, wide open eyes revealing
a v ulnerability and sense of mortality that reflect the artist ’s own
concerns.
Unlike his other depictions of the matador from this period where
the figure is depicted against a plain, monochrome background, this painting
uniquely combines the image of the matador resplendent in an elaborate costume
with that of the arena. The lower half of the background represents the sand of
the bullfighting ring, with hundreds of spectators in the upper half.
The
experience of being taken to the bullring by his father at the age of eight had
a strong impression on Picasso , and his first painting, Le petit picador jaune
, was of a matador on a horse in the arena observed by the spectators behind
him. It is all the more fitting that at the end of his life, he returned to the
celebrated imagery of the bullfights that he had grown up watching.
Despite
leaving Spain to live in Paris in his youth, Picasso retained a sense of
Spanish identity , and the matador was the character that allowed him to draw
attention to his heritage. During the last years of the nineteenth century
Picasso stayed in Madrid, where he copied the old masters at the Prado, and was
no doubt influenced by Goya’s bullfighting scenes. Picasso’s personal memories became
intertwined with his artistic heritage, and in this final series of matador
portraits the ghost of Goya is strongly present.
Le Matador was included in
the exhibition of Picasso’s last great works, organised by Jacqueline at the
Palais des Papes in Avignon shortly after the artist’ s death in 1973 –
presenting the closing period of his oeuvre on the historical walls of one of
the most important medieval Gothic buildings in Europe.
Helena Newman, Global Co - Head of Sotheby’s Impressionist & Modern Art
Department & Chairman of Sotheby’s Europe, said :
‘ This powerful portrait exemplifies Picasso’s creative force in his final years and represents the culmination of a life -long obsession. Through the subject of the bullfight, Picasso explores the theme of life and death, creation and destruction, earth and sun , casting himself at the centre stage of the spectacle. We are thrilled to be presenting two prime examples of works by Picasso at his very best in one sale – Le Matador and Femme au béret et à la robe quadrillée (Marie -Thérèse Walter) – both from key per iods of the artist’s career.’
