Pablo Picasso

Galerie Louise Leiris, Paris

Private Collection, Béziers (by 1969)

Private Collection, Paris (by 1973)

Private Collection, Northern Europe (sold: Christie's, New York, December 10, 1998, lot 522)

Acquired at the above sale by the present owner

Paris, Galerie Pierre, Picasso, 1927-28 (titled Mignon)

Béziers, Musée des Beaux-Arts, Collections privées de Béziers et de sa région, 1969, no. 141

Bordeaux, Galerie des Beaux-Arts; Paris, Musée d'art moderne de la Ville de Paris, Les Cubistes, 1973, no. 14

Paris, L'Humanité, Picasso, 1973, no. 9

Paris, Musée Jacquemart-André, Le Bateau-Lavoir berceau de l'art moderne, 1975-76, no. 56

Christian Zervos, Pablo Picasso, 1906-1912, vol. 2**, Paris, 1942, no. 119, illustrated pl. 60 (as dating from 1908)

Pierre Daix and Joan Rosselet, Picasso, The Cubist Years 1907-1916, London, 1979, no. 249, illustrated p. 237 and pl. XIV (as dating from 1909)

Josep Palau I Fabre, Picasso Cubism (1907-1917), New York, 1990, no. 339, illustrated p. 122

Excellent condition. Original canvas. Under ultra-violet light there is no evidence of inpainting.
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Although it is quite possible that the sitter for this work was Fernande Olivier (see fig. 1), Picasso's lover and subject of many paintings at the time, a veristic record or representation of feminine beauty was not Picasso's concern. It was painted while Les Demoiselles d'Avignon (1907, The Museum of Modern Art, New York) (see fig. 2) with its fractured planes and aggressively posturing female nudes was still in Picasso's Bateau-Lavoir studio. A result of numerous studies and revisions, that monumental work had marked a decisive break from traditional illusionism and compositional conventions aided in part by an interest in "primitive" art that Picasso shared at the time with Henri Matisse and André Derain. The present work continues the sabotage on established practice and marks the way towards Cubism. Indeed, Pierre Daix described the transformation in Picasso's work during 1908-09 as a progression "toward a kind of painting which does not draw its strength from any resemblance but rather from the quality of what is inscribed on the canvas as rhythms and contrasts has led him to this reinterpretation of painted forms beyond the sentimental subject from which they derive, and toward the inherent still life, which one can divine" (Pierre Daix, Picasso: Life and Art, New York, 1993, p. 90).

While Picasso had previously borrowed from African tribal art in a relatively superficial manner -- the women in Demoiselles d'Avignon  have faces that resemble masks while his nudes of summer 1907 are inscribed with striated surface designs typical of certain types of African art -- in the present work Picasso has transposed the sculptural forms of these sources to two-dimensions. The woman's face is a shallow mask-like oval with facial features indicated through shaded indentations. Such reductions to simplified volumes and contours are similarly made in the hair that falls over her shoulders. The color palette with its planes of grays, browns, blacks, and greens and the quickly executed brushwork shading and crosshatching is close to that of Georges Braque's l'Estaque paintings from the summer of 1908, which Picasso had recently become acquainted with through his newfound friendship with the artist (see fig. 3).  Indeed, as André Salmon observed at the time, seeing Braque's work lead Picasso to achieve "a smoothly graduated surface of muted green and terra-cotta planes whose very close light values permit them to pass easily into one another"  (André Salmon quoted in William Rubin, "Primitivism" in 20th Century Art: Affinity of the Tribal and the Modern, New York, 1984, vol. 1, p. 187).

While Femme assise has much in common with Woman with a Fan of 1908 (see fig. 4), the solidly built form of interlocking parts has started to give way to transparency and interpenetration. A heavy black outline maintains three-dimensional form in Woman with a Fan, yet in the present work it takes a less  dominant role inscribing the woman's arms and chest, transforming fractured planes into fragmented forms. As such, the scaffolding on which the component parts of Cubist works would hang starts to emerge. "And it is from this point that he was to launch himself on a new adventure," Pierre Daix remarked,  "fragmenting forms in order to achieve their perfected, living presence in movement. This transformation was worked out entirely in painting" (Pierre Daix, Picasso: Life and Art, New York, 1993, pp. 91-92).

This three-quarter view of a seated woman against an unspecified background provided a taut framework within which Picasso could undermine and push the limits of representation. As he once reflected on his working process at this time, "A picture used to be a sum of additions. In my case a picture is sum of destructions. I do a picture - then I destroy it. In the end, though, nothing is lost. . . " (Pablo Picasso, quoted in Art in Theory, 1900-2000: An Anthology of Changing Ideas, edited by Charles Harrison and Paul Wood, Malden, MA, 2003, p. 499).

Fig. 1, Fernande Olivier, circa 1908-09

Fig. 2,  Pablo Picasso, Les Demoiselles d'Avignon,  June-July 1907, oil on canvas, The Museum of Modern Art, New York. Acquired through the Lillie P. Bliss Bequest

Fig. 3, Georges Braque, La rue près de L'Estaque, late summer 1908, oil on canvas, The Museum of Modern Art, New York

Fig. 4,  Pablo Picasso, Femme à l'evantail (Fernande), 1908, oil on canvas,  The State Hermitage Museum, St. Petersburg