巴布羅·畢加索

Meric Callery, Boulogne-sur-Seine & New York (acquired in 1938)

New York, The Museum of Modern Art; Chicago, The Art Institute of Chicago; St. Louis, The City Art Museum of St. Louis; Boston, Museum of Fine Arts; San Francisco, San Francisco Museum of Modern Art; Cincinnati, Cincinnati Museum of Art; Cleveland, Cleveland Museum of Art; New Orleans, Isaac Delgado Museum; Minneapolis, Minneapolis Institute of Arts; Pittsburgh, Carnegie Institute; Utica, Munson-Williams-Proctor Institute; Durham, Duke University; Kansas City, William Rockhill Nelson Art Gallery; Milwaukee, Milwaukee Art Institute; Grand Rapids, Grand Rapids Art Gallery; Hanover, Dartmouth College; Poughkeepsie, Vassar College; Wellesley, Wellesley College; Sweet Briar, Sweet Briar College; Williamstown, Williams College; Bloomington, Indiana University Art Center Gallery; Alton, Monticello College, & Portland, Portland Art Museum, Picasso: Forty Years of His Art, 1939-40, no. 357

Philadelphia, Philadelphia Museum of Art, The Callery Collection, Picasso-Léger, 1945, n.n., (titled Head of a Woman)

Christian Zervos, Pablo Picasso, oeuvres de 1937-1939,  Paris, 1978, vol. IX, no. 220, illustrated pl. 106

Josep Palau i Fabre, Picasso: From the Minotaur to Guernica (1927-1939). Barcelona, 2011, no. 1225, illustrated n.p. 

Executed on September 8, 1938, Buste de femme belongs to Picasso's celebrated series of portraits of Dora Maar, his mistress and artistic companion in the late 1930s and early 1940s. Picasso's love affair with Maar, a partnership of intellectual exchange and intense passion, resulted in some of the most daring and renowned portraits of his oeuvre. Produced in the midst of the Spanish Civil War and later the Second World War, Picasso's portraits of Maar resonated with the drama and emotional upheaval of the era. Balanced on the edge of Surrealist representation, they fluctuate between naturalism and abstraction to depict a high level of emotional intrigue between artist and model. Though Picasso often assembled these portraits of Dora in rich colors and sculptural forms, the present work is unique in its ability to convey the sitter’s psychological force with the use of only a few effortlessly composed lines.

Maar, a talented artist and photographer closely associated with the Surrealist movement, first met Picasso early in 1936 while he was still married to Olga Khokhlova and involved in an illicit affair with Marie-Thérèse Walter. Unlike the docile and domestic Marie-Thérèse, whose golden beauty had dominated Picasso’s subject matter in the previous decade, Maar was a mature artist who shared his intellectual and political concerns. Over the next eight years, she became Picasso’s lover, companion and principal source of inspiration. Throughout their time together, Picasso would depict her in a variety of ways, from the monstrous character of the weeping women series to dignified monumental depictions such as Dora Maar au chat.

Dora charmed Picasso with her fluent Spanish and austere beauty, but it was her face that truly captured the artist. In the present work, the physical features that Picasso greatly admired - her flowing hair and strong nose - are distorted in a way that powerfully embodies the complex emotions that marked their relationship. After meeting Maar in 1944, James Lord, the noted biographer of Alberto Giacometti and Pablo Picasso, succinctly described the beauty which so transfixed Picasso: “Her gaze possessed remarkable radiance but could also be very hard. I observed that she was beautiful, with a strong, straight nose, perfect scarlet lips, the chin firm, the jaw a trifle heavy and the more forceful for being so, rich chestnut hair drawn smoothly back, and eyelashes like the furred antennae of moths" (J. Lord, Picasso and Dora, New York, 1993, p. 31). Her striking features and complex personality captured the imagination of a number of artists and made her the subject of numerous photographs by Man Ray, Lee Miller and Picasso himself.

Dora aesthetically stimulated Picasso in a way that no other woman had managed, and her features inspired the now iconic “double portrait” device. In the present work, Picasso renders Dora’s face in profile, yet both of her eyes, ears and nostrils are fully visible. Stemming from the circulating viewpoint that he had used in his cubist works, the double profile is a vitally important and essential evolution in Picasso’s pictorial structure. In Buste de femme, Maar's strong, contorted features dually express her fierce physical beauty as well as her powerful personality: “For years I have painted her [Dora Maar] in tortured forms, not through sadism, and not with pleasure either; just obeying a vision that forced itself on me. It was the deep reality, not the superficial one” (quoted in F. Gilot, Life with Picasso, New York, 1964, p. 122.)

In a recent survey of portraits of Dora, Brigitte Léal describes the importance of these portraits in Picasso’s artistic development: “They remain among the finest achievement of his art, at a time when he was engaged in a sort of third path, verging on Surrealist representation while rejecting strict representation and, naturally, abstraction. Today, more than ever, the fascination that the image of this admirable, but suffering and alienated face exerts on us incontestably ensues from its conceding with our modern consciousness of the body in its threefold dimension of precariousness, ambiguity and monstrosity. There is no doubt that by signing these portraits, Picasso tolled the final bell for the reign of ideal beauty and opened the way for the aesthetic tyranny of a sort of terrible and tragic beauty, the fruit of our contemporary history” ("For Charming Dora: Portraits of Dora Maar" in Picasso and Portraiture: Representation and Transformation (exhibition catalogue), The Museum of Modern Art, New York & Galeries Nationales du Grand Palais, Paris, 1996-97, p. 385).

The first owner of Buste de femme was the American sculptor Mary (Meric) Callery, who moved from New York to Paris in 1930. She befriended many artists there during the 1930s including Pablo Picasso and Fernand Léger. Independently wealthy, she collected widely during her first residency in Paris, bringing the entirety of her collection back to the United States when she left in 1940. Her collection of works by Picasso and Léger was displayed in a dedicated exhibition at the Philadelphia Museum of Art in 1945. Buste de femme was also included in Alfred Barr's seminal exhibition Picasso: Forty Years of His Art, held at the Museum of Modern Art, New York, in 1939-40. Callery formed an indelible part of New York City history when she was commissioned by her friends Philip Johnson and Nelson Rockefeller to create a sculpture for the proscenium arch in the Metropolitan Opera House at Lincoln Center, where it still crowns the stage.