Pablo Picasso

The present work belongs to a celebrated group of portraits of Sylvette David (fig. 3), whom Picasso first met in the spring of 1953. A daughter of a Paris art dealer and an English-born artist mother, Sylvette came to Vallauris in the south of France to visit her fiancé who worked across the road from Picasso's home, La Galloise. Her fiancé was a maker of avant-garde metal chairs which Picasso admired. He asked for a few chairs to be delivered to the studio and invited the young couple to his home one evening. Picasso later presented Sylvette with a portrait drawn from memory and persuaded her to model for him. Sylvette was twenty years old at the time Picasso painted the present portrait, and she was the only one of Picasso's female models with whom he had no romantic relationship.

Klaus Gallwitz wrote about Picasso's depictions of Sylvette as a 'famous [...] set of portraits, painted in the Spring of 1954, of Mademoiselle David, whose first name Sylvette, immediately conjures up the vivid image of a young girl with a long neck on narrow, sloping shoulders, a classical face, straight nose, and thick blond hair in a pony tail. Sylvette herself posed for them, inspiring a series the stylistic range of which is unusually wide. The pictures are generally limited to gray tones and almost without exception show the girl in full to three-quarter profile, in every conceivable style from an almost imitative naturalism to a highly abstract variation of a simplified cubism. The portraits concentrate so single-mindedly on the youthful head that the individual features become subsidiary to the type into which Picasso condensed them' (K. Gallwitz, Picasso. The Heroic Years, New York, 1985, p. 90).

Sylvette's stunning features fascinated Picasso so much that throughout April and May 1954 he composed a number of paintings (figs. 1 & 2) and drawings in a range of styles. Sylvette's youthful profile was also the subject of several sheet metal sculptures as well as two monumental concrete sculptures. The present work is painted in a range of grey tones reminiscent of the grisaille technique, adding to the composition a note of elegance and classical beauty. Echoing the post-Cubist style with which Picasso had earlier rendered Dora Maar, the figure is broken into interlocking rectangular planes. In this way, the artist achieved a level of abstraction, whilst at the same time retaining the recognisable features of his model. Discussing this series of works, Marie-Laure Bernadac commented: 'Passing from a graceful realism to a severe geometry, the series of portraits of Sylvette anticipates his sheet-metal sculpture and foreshadows the triumphant entry into his painting of Mme Z, the 'Modern Sphinx', of whom he was to make two celebrated portraits in June 1954' (M. L. Bernadac, 'Picasso 1953-1972: Painting as a Model', in Late Picasso, Paintings, Sculpture, Drawings, Prints 1953-1972 (exhibition catalogue), Tate Gallery, London, 1988, p. 54).

Although Picasso did not have a romantic relationship with Sylvette, Pierre Daix wrote about his fascination with his young model and the effect she had on his art: 'Picasso glowed with enthusiasm and spoke of her with such warmth that I suspected he had fallen in love. He disabused me by describing the fiancé. The challenge posed by Sylvette was in fact the challenge of a new type of woman. Through her he would appropriate for his own purposes the generation which followed that of Françoise, and even of Geneviève Laporte. At this point he plunged into one of his most extraordinary campaigns of possession, not through working and reworking an oil painting but with a dazzling series of forty paintings and drawings done inside a month. Sylvette seated in an armchair; Sylvette in three-quarter face; Sylvette in profile; in the vigorous geometrization used for the nudes of Françoise; and in all the grace of her natural curves, with the neck more or less elongated; somewhat stockier; somewhat thinner; Sylvette obdurate; closed; ironic; absent. How to capture the secret of her youth? The secret of painting?' (P. Daix, Picasso, Life and Art, New York, 1993, p. 318).