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PABLO PICASSO (1881-1973) Femme tenant un chat dans ses bras signed “Picasso” (upper right) and...

Currency:USD Category:Everything Else / Other Start Price:NA Estimated At:900,000.00 - 1,200,000.00 USD
PABLO PICASSO (1881-1973) Femme tenant un chat dans ses bras signed “Picasso” (upper right) and...

PABLO PICASSO

(1881-1973)

Femme tenant un chat dans ses bras

signed “Picasso” (upper right) and dated “2.5.64.” (upper left)

oil on canvas

116.2 x 89.5 cm (45 3⁄4 x 35 1⁄4 in.)

painted in 1964

Estimate: £620,000–820,000

$900,000–1,200,000





Provenance

Galerie Louise Leiris, Paris (acquired from the artist)

Daniel Malingue, Paris

Andrew Crispo Gallery, New York

Acquired from the above by the present owner on May 25, 1974




Literature

Christian Zervos, Pablo Picasso, Paris, 1983, vol. 24 (Oeuvres de 1964), no. 137 (illustrated, pl. 44)

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This powerful work provides ample evidence of the sheer vitality of Picasso’s creative endeavour in his late period during which time he was often inspired by the strong features of his mistress, Jacqueline Roque.
He had never been more prolific as a painter than during these years, and indeed “Picasso’s prolific production of oil paintings did not abate in the last years of his life, the 1973 exhibition in Avignon of 201 paintings that he had made between 1970 and 1972 is the best demonstration of this” (Gary Tinterow, Master Drawings by Picasso, exh. cat., Fogg Art Museum, Cambridge, Massachusetts, 1981, p. 232).
The formal relationship that usually exists between drawings and paintings (the former usually studies for the latter) was reversed by Picasso in old age:
“If his paintings of this late period often look like pages from a sketchbook, so rapidly noted are his ideas: conversely Picasso’s drawings are often highly elaborated and carefully executed” (ibid.).
The present picture also has a hieratic, timeless quality. Describing a similarly conceived, if later, gouache of 1972, Buste de femme, les bras croisés (Zervos vol. 33, no. 371). Tinterow saw the influence of ancient Egyptian art: “the emphasis on the heavily lidded eyes…the serene expression and monumental scale do evoke the art of ancient Egypt. Did Picasso remember the Douanier Rousseau’s remark to him 65 years earlier ‘Picasso, you and I are the greatest painters of our time, you in the Egyptian style, I in the Modern?’” (ibid.).
However, there are other important influences at play in this painting.
It belongs to a large series of paintings of women holding a cat (Zervos vol. 24, nos. 66, 94, 96-99, 131-134, 136, 139, 140-143). The black cat in proximity with a female nude may be a clear reference to Manet’s Olympia, but it is also one of Picasso’s favourite pets of the period. As Marie-Laure Bernadac has noted: “The little black cat comes from Manet’s Olympia. This black cat was not an erotic attribute, but a real cat that Picasso and Jacqueline had found and picked up in Mougins” (Brigitte Léal, Christine Piot and Marie-Laure Bernadac, The Ultimate Picasso, Barcelona, 2000, p. 444).