Pablo Picasso

Comte Etienne de Beaumont (acquired from the artist)
Mme M. Kniasef, Paris (acquired from the above)
Perls Galleries, New York (acquired from the above)
Weintraub Gallery, New York 
Acquired from the above in 1969 at the Beth Sholom Jubilee Art Exhibition, Elkins Park, Pennsylvannia 

This work is in excellent condition. Executed on gray paper t-hinged to a mount at two places along the top edge on verso. Left edge is deckled; top, bottom and right edges have been cut. A watermark is visible along the right edge on the verso of the sheet. Colors are bright and fresh.
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The present work is a design for the stage curtain from the ballet Mercure performed in Paris in June 1924. Picasso’s fascination with the stage was long established, dating back to his depictions of Saltimbiques and characters from the Commedia dell’arte. Mercure was produced by Comte Étienne de Beaumont with music by Erik Satie; as the title suggests the ballet centers around Mercury, the messenger of the Gods. Douglas Cooper asserts, however, that the stage curtain had little to do with the theme of the ballet: “Everyone with whom I have discussed Mercure, including Massine, has described it as being essentially Picasso’s ballet. That is to say, that Picasso’s interpretation of the scenes, his décor, his stage effects, his use of color, his inventive groupings dominated the spectacle. Once again Picasso designed a curtain—largely painting by himself—which bore no immediate relation to the theme of the ballet… The actual subject was yet another version of one of his favorite themes of the period, a guitar playing Harlequin accompanied by a violin-playing Pierrot which Picasso had painted and drawn frequently since his visit to Naples in 1917. But this time the style of execution was different. Line and color were here treated independently, the figures being very freely drawn in continuous black lines against a background of muted colors—blue for the sky, reddish brown for the ground, red for Harlequin’s costume and white for that of Pierrot” (quoted in Olivier Berggruen & Max Hollein, eds., Picasso and the Theater (exhibition catalogue), Schirn Kunsthalle, Frankfurt, 2006, pp. 243-44).

The ballet was composed of “Poses Plastiques” in three different scenes, each performed before a screen, which in turn had thin wire figures placed in front of it. These wire figures, not to mention the backdrop curtains, costume designs and associated studies and sketches, all underscored a new direction in Picasso’s art. While drawing on classical themes that had occupied him in the preceding years, brave new ideas were coming to the fore. Gertrude Stein wrote: “Calligraphy, as I understand it in him had perhaps its most intense moment in the décor of Mercure. That was written, so simply written, no painting, pure calligraphy. A little before that he had made a series of drawings, also purely calligraphic, the lines were extraordinarily lines, there were also stars that were stars which moved, they existed, they were really cubism, that is to say a thing that existed in itself without the aid of association or emotion” (Gertrude Stein, Picasso, London, 1939, pp. 37-38).