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Property from a European collection PABLO PICASSO (1881-1973) Femme au chignon noir signed

Currency:USD Category:Everything Else / Other Start Price:NA Estimated At:3,500,000.00 - 4,500,000.00 USD
Property from a European collection PABLO PICASSO (1881-1973) Femme au chignon noir signed
Property from a
European collection
PABLO PICASSO
(1881-1973)
Femme au chignon noir
signed "Picasso" (upper right)
oil on canvas
36 1/4 x 25 5/8 in. (92 x 65 cm)
painted on October 28, 1948
Estimate: $3,500,000-4,500,000
This powerful, hieratic painting relates closely to another work of a similar subject that Picasso painted on the following day, October 29, 1948 (FIG. 1). Both of these canvases maintain the bold, monochromatic coloring to be found in many of his greatest wartime portraits. Pablo Picasso had met Françoise Gilot in May 1943, and they settled in Cap d'Antibes in July 1946. The period that followed was one of great happiness for the artist and his new mistress, who became pregnant that year. The war was over and a new optimism entered the artist's work, with mythological, even Arcadian themes becoming prevalent in certain areas of his oeuvre. The austere character of his wartime art gradually gave way to a lightening of tone. This transition can be seen clearly by comparing the present work with two similarly conceived monumental portraits painted later, on March 9 and March 13 (FIGS. 2 and 3). Some of these later portraits, influenced by the light of Provence and by Matisse, are more obviously decorative and lyrical than the present work, which stands out within the period for its intensity and monumentality.
Gilot was the subject of numerous portraits throughout the late 1940s, and her features lay at the heart of his vision of womanhood during this period, even if few works reproduced her features in a naturalistic and clearly recognizable manner. Klaus Gallwitz has explained that the seated woman "was a subject which absorbed him more than any other and which is certainly the most important one in his whole oeuvre... Women were chosen to symbolize prevailing conditions" (Klaus Gallwitz, Picasso: The Heroic Years, New York, 1985, pp. 79-80). However, Frank Elgar specifically singled out the special qualities of the paintings inspired by Gilot as follows: "The portraits of Françoise Gilot have a Madonna-like appearance, in contrast to the tormented figures he was painting a few years earlier" (Frank Elgar, Picasso, New York, 1972, p. 123).
These years were also important and challenging in other respects. After World War II, Picasso became increasingly involved with the Communist Party, which he had joined in 1944 and which he saw as a symbol of French resistance to the Nazis. Picasso, in turn, was also widely celebrated as a heroic emblem of the Resistance, an artist who had endured the war years in Paris in stoical solitude, refusing to flee. He attended the Communist Party Conference in Warsaw in 1948, the year that he executed this painting. Michael Fitzgerald, however, implies that the portraits of this period, far from expressing overtly political concerns, represent Picasso's private sanctuary away from the complex world of politics: "Despite some efforts to cooperate with the Party's political program, Picasso ridiculed its aesthetic directives...(and) engaged himself almost totally with themes outside its program, subjects which a Stalinist would probably call 'decadent': intimate examinations of his family, and reflections on his place in the history of art..." (Michael C. Fitzgerald, "A Triangle of Ambitions: Art, Politics and Family during the Postwar Years with Françoise Gilot," PICASSO AND PORTRAITURE, exh. cat., Museum of Modern Art, New York, 1996, p. 427).
Discussing another, directly comparable, but earlier painting, femme assise (Françoise), March 1945 (Zervos vol. 14, no. 77; Musée Picasso, Paris), Fitzgerald identified stylistic features that distinguish the present work as well: "Picasso created an image that plays off the figure's static, seated pose to create an effect of great force. By choosing a canvas with proportions that emphasize its verticality and then constructing the image from a low viewpoint (he) accentuates the figure's height. Instead of a sedentary figure, Picasso orchestrated a series of Cubist dislocations..." (ibid., p. 416). <p>Provenance
Galerie Beyeler, Basel
Acquired from the above by the present owner <p>Exhibited
Basel, Galerie Beyeler, Picasso: Der Maler und seine Modelle, July-October,1986, no. 35 (illustrated in color) <p>Literature
Christian Zervos , Pablo Picasso, Paris, 1983, vol. 15 (Oeuvres de 1946 à 1953), no. 104 (illustrated, pl. 59; as Femme au chignon assise)
The Picasso Project, ed., Picasso's Paintings, Watercolors, Drawings and Sculpture. A Comprehensive Illustrated Catalogue: Liberation and Post-War Years 1944-1949, San Francisco, 1995, p. 205, no. 48-033 (illustrated)
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