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35

PABLO PICASSO (1881-1973) Femme et cage à oiseaux près de la fenêtre signed

Currency:USD Category:Everything Else / Other Start Price:NA Estimated At:6,000,000.00 - 8,000,000.00 USD
PABLO PICASSO (1881-1973) Femme et cage à oiseaux près de la fenêtre signed
PABLO PICASSO
(1881-1973)
Femme et cage à oiseaux
près de la fenêtre
signed "Picasso" (lower center)
oil on canvas
39 3/8 x 31 7/8 in. (100 x 81 cm)
painted ca. 1941-1942
Estimate: $6,000,000-8,000,000 <p>Provenance
Galerie Louise Leiris, Paris
Dr. Herschel Carey Walker, Hartford, CT
Paul Rosenberg & Co., New York
Bernice McIlhenny Wintersteen, Philadelphia (sale: Sotheby's,
New York, October 17, 1973, lot 37) <p>Exhibited
Philadelphia, Philadelphia Museum of Art, Summer Loan Exhibitions, 1964 and 1965
San Francisco, California Palace of the Legion of Honor and Santa Barbara, Santa Barbara Museum of Art, The Collection of Mrs. John Wintersteen, 1966, no. 31(illustrated)
Dallas, Dallas Museum of Fine Arts, Pablo Picasso, A Retrospective Exhibition, February 8-March 26, 1967, p. 96, no. 67 (illustrated, p. 68; as Woman with Bird Cage)
Philadelphia, Philadelphia Museum of Art, summer loan exhibitions, 1970 and 1971
New York, Marlborough Gallery and Saidenberg Gallery, Homage to Picasso for his 90th Birthday, October, 1971, no. 62 (illustrated)
Philadelphia, Philadelphia Museum of Art, summer loan exhibition, 1972 <p>Literature
Harriet and Sidney Janis, Picasso, The Recent Years, New York, 1946, pl. 55 (illustrated); among a group of works at the Galerie Louise Leiris)
Maurice Gieure, Initiation à l'oeuvre de Picasso, Paris, 1951, no. 100
David-Henry Kahnweiler, "Huit entretiens avec Picasso," Le Point, October, 1952, p. 7 (illustrated)
Fernand Hazan, Picasso, Paris, 1955, p. 291
Françoise Gilot, Life with Picasso, New York, 1964, p. 16
The Picasso Project, ed., Picasso's Paintings, Watercolors, Drawings and Sculpture. A Comprehensive Illustrated Catalogue; Nazi Occupation 1940-1944, San Francisco, 1995,
p. 113, no. 41-323 (illustrated)
Picasso and the War Years, 1937-1945, exh. cat., Fine Arts Museums of California, 1998, p. 116 (illustrated in a photograph of the interior of Galerie Louise Leiris, Paris, ca. 1944-1946)
Painted between 1941 and 1942, during the Nazi Occupation of France, this remarkably intense, superbly resolved painting is quite unique for the period in its compositional complexity and sophistication. The work differs stylistically from the majority of the wartime portraits of women, which are generally more simply conceived and unambiguously austere in character. At this time Picasso was profoundly influenced by the features of his mistress Dora Maar, "the Proustian mixture of two persons" (Brigitte Baer in Picasso and the War Years, exh. cat., op. cit., p. 91). Brigitte Léal, writing of Dora Maar considered that "the innumerable, very different portraits that Picasso did of her remain among the finest achievements of his art...Today, more than ever, the fascination that the image of this admirable, but suffering and alienated, face exerts on us incontestably ensues from its coinciding with our modern consciousness of the body in its threefold dimension of precariousness, ambiguity, and monstrosity" (Brigitte Léal, Picasso and Portraiture, exh. cat., Museum of Modern Art, New York, 1995, p. 385).
In this work, Picasso presents the viewer with a Janus-like double-headed woman, her face divided by an alluring mane of dark hair, which mimes the upward thrust of the plant to the left of the composition. Zervos records a series of drawings of a similar motif that were executed in August 1941 (FIGs. 1-2), as well as an oil with similar features, titled Buste de Femme (FIG. 3).
Although Picasso rarely attempted to illustrate current events, this painting is strongly suggestive of that tragic period. The double-faced woman may represent the dual aspects of his mistress, who was known for frequent emotional outbursts alternating with periods of calm. But on another, deeper level it encapsulates the anxiety of the Occupation, a time characterized by continuous fear of the unknown and a general suspicion of duplicitous associates.
Brigitte Baer elaborates: "No one talked. Parents forbade their children to tell their classmates what happened at home; silence and suspicion were the watchwords. For a 'mirror-being' like Picasso, a fearful, worried person who could not endure "emotion," it was, though he probably did not realize it, a psychological ordeal that could not fail to lend a certain tone to his painting" (Brigitte Baer, op. cit., p. 85).
The birdcage in the background is especially striking. Picasso often portrayed birds with symbolic intent. In Guernica (Zervos, vol. 9, no. 65), a shrieking bird can be detected in the shadowy background. Birds devoured by cats were symbolic of the fate of anti-Fascists, for example in Cat and Bird, April 1939 (Zervos 9, no. 297). However, birds and cages are ambiguous symbols, representing both entrapment and the potential for freedom. In a series of studies of pigeons executed in 1942 (Zervos vol. 12, nos. 168 and 169-183), the motif is lighter in mood and represents a natural alternative to the political turmoil. On the other hand, Picasso is known to have been terrified of the threat of German aerial bombardment, and to have referred to German Stukas metaphorically as viciously swooping birds.
Plant and architectural forms, both of which appear in this painting, also often feature as single elements within Picasso's art at this time. What marks the present work as a masterpiece of this vital period is the fact that it combines so many of Picasso's wartime icons within a single canvas. While it shares the coloring and sense of claustrophobia of the majority of Picasso's most successful wartime paintings, it also contains a sense of air and light. The woman is both looking through the window but is also, paradoxically, seen by the viewer to be positioned beyond the window frame. She is thus both imprisoned and free, like the bird that she appears to study with such interest. At the beginning of 1940, Picasso had taken a studio in Royan on the fourth floor of Villa Les Voiliers, which had a sea view. Some of the works that he painted there have a similar sense of space, for example Café at Royan (Zervos vol. 9, no. 88; Musée Picasso, Paris), characterized by Picasso's depiction of rooftops, which suggest sky and thus freedom and flight, albeit with a palpable sense of anxiety. At the same time, the rigid geometry here is reminiscent of the many paintings that contain elements of Picasso's rue des Grands-Augustins studio, where he lived during the majority of the German Occupation. Of course, ambiguity lay at the very heart of Picasso's creative vision, both thematically and formally. Cubism had started with the premise that the viewer sees objects from differing angles simultaneously. However, in this work, such formal considerations are heightened to great symbolic effect as well.
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