Showing posts with label Pablo Picasso. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Pablo Picasso. Show all posts

23.4.25

The Rise of Pablo Picasso




How a young man from Málaga became one of the costliest painters on earth.


Pablo Ruiz y Picasso has been the most talked-of and written-about artist on earth. Commercially he has become the costliest painter alive and aesthetically he has remained the most influential. His pictures, like hand-painted gilt-edged stocks, have followed a rising graph of their own; he has influenced a generation of painters who copied what they understood of him and he has influenced a public which has bought him without always understanding any part of him. When he first came to Paris, as a Spanish youth of nineteen, he dressed as a laboring man because of poverty and a preference for the picturesque. Even in recent years, when seen sitting prosperous and unoccupied in a Left Bank café, he has retained a look of sombre isolation and of a man devoted to work. Miss Gertrude Stein’s friend, Miss Alice B. Toklas, says a friend of hers said Picasso looks like a handsome bootblack.

He is a Spanish bourgeois. He was born in Málaga, October 25, 1881. His mother’s people were silversmiths, originally from Genoa; his father, of Basque origin, became drawing teacher at the estimable Barcelona Academy of Fine Arts, which, had it known what the son was in future to paint, would not have thought it fine or art. Young Pablo’s connection with his father’s institution was that of a passing prodigy who at the age of fifteen completed in one day the competitive art examination which older students were given a month for. A few months later he was received at the Madrid Academy for a year; then, three years later, in 1900, he went to Paris, centre of European art.

Impressionism, the great nineteenth century iconoclastic art movement, which the public had greeted with jeers, was then on its highly respectable way out. Cubism, the twentieth century’s new revolutionary art formula, which the public was also to hoot at, was almost on its way in, though Picasso, who was to lead Cubism, didn’t know it yet. He was still busy painting like the Impressionist Toulouse-Lautrec. Picasso finally settled in Montmartre at 13 Rue Ravignan in a ramshackle edifice resembling a Seine laundry boat and nicknamed Le Bateau-Lavoir. Those were heroic Montmartre days, since a handful of imaginative, important artists were, in poverty, hatching their fabulous future. Though he was unsociable, Picasso’s talent eventually placed him with the other talented unknowns with whom he belonged—with the minor poet Max Jacob, first to discover and make a cult of Picasso; the major poet (then editor of a physical-culture magazine) Guillaume Apollinaire, first to write of Picasso; the struggling painters Derain, Braque, Matisse, Modigliani, Juan Gris, Van Dongen, and Marie Laurencin. Other friends were Frédé, art-loving innkeeper of the uproarious Lapin Agile, who used to bring his pet donkey to parties; innocent Douanier Rousseau, about to marry for the third time; and Picasso’s model, the beautiful Fernande Olivier. Everybody was, or acted, young; everybody borrowed money from everybody else, and owed money for paint and rent; everybody quarrelled, made love, drank, ate risotto because it was cheap, and worked like a steam engine. Picasso carried a revolver, kept a tame white mouse in a table drawer, couldn’t afford even the luxury of painting on his walls—as he had when a student in Spain—pictures of the furniture he lacked. When he didn’t have white paint for his pictures, he painted with blue; when he ran out of new canvas, over the portrait of a crippled flower-seller he painted the big red harlequin that later figured in the Rouart collection; when he lacked linseed oil, he painted with lamp oil. He always kept on hand a supply of lamp oil because he worked at night so people couldn’t bother him.

At one time he was so poor that he and Max Jacob occupied the same bed in turns. Jacob, who besides being a cultivated poet was an impoverished novelty-shop clerk, slept at night while Picasso worked; when Jacob got up in the morning to let Picasso go to bed, the floor would be carpeted with drawings, which Jacob had to walk on and from which his footprints later had to be cleaned by art experts, since every early Picasso fragment eventually became so valuable that it could be sold. These first few Paris years in Picasso’s young twenties were viewed as a period of art, partially happy and entirely human, and were thus rare for him. At this time he painted his sad groups of the blue-colored Blue Period (after pleasant trips home to Spain) and his precious, romantic, rosy-tinted Rose Period figures (after a journey to Holland, which he found gloomy and didn’t like). This was also the feverishly fecund Harlequin Period, during which he painted the tumblers, harlequins, and jugglers whom he admired at the Médrano Circus; when he sympathetically painted the beautiful thin skulls of the poor, topped by gay clowns’ hats; when he portrayed the spangled acrobat, his wife, and male child, posed like a new Holy Family in lovely disguise. This was Picasso’s only art period of sentimental and sociological sensibility, and he probably didn’t mean it to be either. He was simply a young painter who was painting.

The first picture Picasso ever sold was bought the day after he arrived in Paris in 1900 by a Mademoiselle Berthe Weill, who ran a bric-a-brac shop and bought anybody’s first picture at any time. The next year, Vollard, the great eccentric art merchant, gave Picasso an obscure little exhibition called “Scènes des Courses et des Cabarets” and bought some pictures which, as was his habit, he hid in his cellar, where they brought Picasso no renown. Soulié, a mattress dealer on the Rue des Martyrs, also bought Picassos, apparently for a horse dealer with leanings toward art speculation. The art merchant Sagot, who kept his pictures in an old pharmacy and gave artists handouts of stale medicines, also purchased Picassos—at cruelly low prices. Once, when Picasso refused 700 francs (then $140) for three big paintings, Sagot offered 500 francs and, to Picasso’s helpless, hungry fury, got them the day after for 300. Picasso was then alone in his spirited resistance to the art merchants’ racket. As a chorus girl traditionally hopes for a butter-and-egg man, so in France the poor, unknown artist must hope to be kept by an art merchant, to whom he cedes a long term contract for his future at a low price. Even when a beginner, Picasso refused to do this, as he also refused to manifest group solidarity and show his pictures at the Salon des Indépendants. In purchasing Picasso as a discovery, Russian, German, and American collectors were ahead of the French, who had also been slow in taking to Impressionism. The first collector to buy Picasso was Shchukin, the rich Russian industrialist whose Picassos now hang in the Soviet Museum of Modern Western Art in Moscow. The expatriate German collector-merchant Kahnweiler was another early buyer.

However, just before this time, Gertrude Stein, rich in enthusiasm but modest in means and then about as unknown as a writer as Picasso was as a painter, began her famous and eclectic Picasso collection and her friendship with him, which, through squabbles and over years, have been two of the most important personal elements in the Picasso legend. For her first Picasso, she and her brother Leo paid Sagot 150 francs and all three quarrelled about the picture’s merits. It was the early, exquisite, conventional nude, “A Little Girl with Basket of Flowers.” Miss Stein, who was already ripe to prefer stranger sights in art, thought the girl looked classically flat-footed; Sagot suggested they guillotine the girl and keep only the head. After Miss Stein became friends with Picasso she bought directly from him; she says that from 1906 to 1909 the Stein family controlled the Picasso output, since no one else wanted it. By 1919 she could no longer offer to buy at 100 francs pictures that were worth thousands, so Picasso gave them to her. In 1906, she posed eighty times for his portrait of her, after which he wiped the face off, saying he couldn’t “see” her any more, and then finished the likeness in Spain, where he couldn’t see her at all. He also gave her this portrait because, as he later said, at that time in his career the difference between a gift and a sale was, after all, negligible. He also said, when friends complained that the portrait didn’t look like her, that someday she’d look like the portrait. This has never happened, and became less likely than ever to happen when she cut her hair, which upset Picasso more than any of her other friends because his portrait showed her with her hair long. The 1906 Stein portrait was a boundary mark; it showed that the gay, romantic period was definitely at an end, that the intellectual, serious search for Cubism was now on.

Why Cubism had to be invented still puzzles a large public. At the time, the poet Apollinaire, in his famous essay on the subject, said that Cubism was “a search for a new composition with formal elements borrowed not from the reality of vision but from the reality of conception”—words which bewildered Parisians no less than the paintings themselves. More bluntly defined, Cubism was apparently an effort scientifically to give painting not two but three dimensions, these to be attained, in theory anyhow, by depicting the subject—whether an apple or a man—as if it or he consisted of visible geometric facets. Thus, in practice, the Cubist portrait of a handsome man looked like a still life of beautiful building blocks. Cubism also was probably an early prophetic Zeitgeist reflection of the non-naturalistic machine-age civilization. In any case, Cubism marked the point in modern art where the artist and public no longer saw eye to eye no matter what both were looking at; when the artist, indeed, began deliberately painting what he did not see and what no one else could check up on.

Who, from what source, at what date, and with what picture, invented Cubism, which Picasso at any rate was to dominate, is still a delicate dispute. The first authentic example of Cubism, modern museum men say, was done in 1907 by Picasso—his big painting “Les Demoiselles d’Avignon.” Miss Stein says Picasso’s three 1908 pictures of some cubelike cottages in Spain were “the real beginning of Cubism.” She also says that some African Negro masks (whose exotic angularity also reportedly aided in formulating Cubism) were perhaps shown by the sculptor Maillol to the painter Matisse, who then showed them to the painter Picasso, though there was also the tradition that Picasso first saw the masks through the painter Derain. She says still further that probably the name “Cubism” was invented by Apollinaire. Jean Cocteau says Cubism was a name invented by Matisse to deride a south-of-France picture by Braque in the 1908 Indépendants show; Apollinaire says that the Negro sculpture “which was destined to influence new French art” was discovered by Vlaminck and that the friendship between Picasso and Derain in 1905 “gave birth to Cubism, which at first was, above all, a sort of impressionism of the forms which Cézanne had envisioned toward the end of his life.” Picasso himself simply and plurally says, “When we made Cubism we didn’t mean to make Cubism but to express what was in us.” Although the French public at first said only that Cubism was crazy, a leading art merchant added, “I am now buying Picasso not because I have any taste for him but because he will be worth a lot of money someday.” By 1910, Cubism was a regular French studio school, with Jean Metzinger as its first academic theorician and Gleizes, Delaunay, and Léger as faithful exponents. Picasso’s precise early version of Cubism was so much copied that he called one of his best impersonators “the louse that lives on my head.” One night, at the beginning of the World War, Picasso and Miss Stein were taking a walk when they saw a camouflaged truck for the first time. He was amazed by its resemblance to Cubist art, and, in the tone of a man who has just been plagiarized, said, “Why, it is we who invented that!” Later, when a new field uniform for the French army was being discussed, he told Cocteau, “If they want to make an army invisible at a distance, all they have to do is dress the men as harlequins.”

After the war, when the alien Kahnweiler’s scholarly Cubist collection, which had been seized by the French government, was sold for low prices by an anti-Cubist auctioneer (whose head Braque punched, to teach him about modern art), Cubist paintings, like any commodity in a bear market, slumped. Now the New York Museum of Modern Art’s recent Cubist acquisition, “Les Demoiselles d’Avignon,” has just been valued by art experts at $20,000, the highest figure any contemporary canvas, even by Picasso, has reached. When, years ago, the collector Shchukin first saw the picture, he wailed that its ugliness marked the end of modern French art. Many people still think the historic young ladies from Avignon are a frightening lot.


By 1912, for those painters who had struggled in Paris to create the new art, the big moment had passed, because prosperity was creeping up on them. Poverty had united Picasso and his comrades; success separated them. He moved from Montmartre to the nicer Left Bank, and they, too, went their more comfortable ways.

From 1896 down through 1939 (according to experts, when they can agree), Picasso’s pictures fall into about twenty-six styles, most of them such typical Picassos that they look as if they had been painted by twenty-six different men. No other painter of his stature has ever offered so many completely differentiated versions of himself as Picasso. For forty years he has been in a constant fit of metamorphosis. Starting in his youth as the most gifted graphic artist of his time—i.e., the one most able to delineate likenesses of things or people in the grand manner—he has spent his years detailing unlikenesses in an increasingly varied and cerebral manner. He has also, his classicist enemies maintain, debauched the aesthetic tradition of Europe by the power of his painting personality and has made ugliness the style. When a painter fails to settle down into one matured mood, critics usually figure he hasn’t found himself. Picasso is deemed to have found himself two dozen times over and, among his special public, has made much of his reputation precisely on his restless, drastic mutations—which he silently invents in his own seasons and which only his devotees garrulously explain throughout the years. Assuming that Picasso (or anyhow part of Picasso) will be considered a master two hundred years from now, collectors and experts in the twenty-second century will have a hard time identifying a Picasso as easily as they identify, for instance, a Titian today, except for the fact that Picasso usually carefully and legibly signs his pictures with his name, often adding the year in roman numbers, plus the month and day on which the picture was completed. However, modern French experts say that all Picasso’s styles, no matter how different, and whether autographed or not, have one recognizable entity, a thing they call le signe, meaning the graphic “line” peculiar to him which they count as a signature in itself.

To the public, out of his twenty odd periods the most intelligible and appreciated are the melancholy Blue (1901-04); the picturesque Harlequins, Clowns, and Saltimbanques (1905); the sentimental Rose (1905-06); the Analytical Cubism, especially because of the fine, fertile, popular compositions featuring bits of guitars and newspapers (1909-12); and the Classic Figures (first part of the 1918-25 style). The faces and eyes of three women also date and differentiate some of his works. The almond-eyed French Fernande Olivier is visible through the romantic Rose Period. The second feminine, straight-eyed face is that of the Russian ballet dancer Olga Koklova, whom Picasso married in the Paris Russian Church in 1917. Through her, the Spaniard in Picasso was temporarily exotically influenced by the new popularity of anything Slavic; Picasso was the first of the big painters to shock aesthetes by descending to the task of making some of Diaghilev’s Russian Ballet stage sets—for “Parade,” “Tricorne,” “Pulcinella”—and the cruel, truncated décors for the ballet “Cuadro Flamenco.” The enlarging domestic influence of Madame Picasso marked the early 1920 period of gigantic female nudes, sometimes also attributed to the influence of Greek sculptures or just to big French women bathing on the Juan-les-Pins beach. A typical and tender 1923 line-edged classic portrait of Picasso’s wife eventually won the Carnegie Institute art prize in 1930. In 1927, when some experts consider Picasso terminated his many experiments with Cubism, he painted a final Cubist portrait of his son, Pavlo, dressed as a harlequin. Picasso’s marriage was ended by divorce in 1937. Since then the profile of Dora Maar—a profile usually painted with two handsome sloe eyes and both handsome nostrils visible—as marked Picasso’s recent deliberately deformed and decorative curvilinear portrait work. Dora Maar is a Yugoslav of good family who shortened her name from Markovitch and is now a well-known professional photographer in Paris.

A complete list of Picasso’s various artistic activities and periods is a lengthy affair, since it also comprises periods classified as Negro, realist, abstract, monochrome, planes, papier collé, pointillism, neo-Impressionism; a period of neo-Renoirism called “Homage to Renoir” (at which old Renoir took umbrage), classicism, heroicism, an adult or second Roseism, imitations of his own Cubism, rectilinear forms, sumptuous still lifes, portraits in which people look like still lifes of machinery, surrealism, sculpture, fantasies molded from wire, tin, or pressed paper, the so-called unheimlich or unpleasant manner, enormous natures mortes, and sleeping women. In 1933 he had a period known as the Relâche Period because during it he did not paint at all. Then came bullfights, extraordinary legendary man-animal figures, and finally the Spanish war and his much-discussed mural of the bombed city of Guernica.

The Spanish war profoundly affected Picasso, theretofore politically indifferent. His patriotism, previously visible principally in the nostalgic Spanish shadows of his Blue Period, became passionately republican. He refused to shake Italians by the hand because they were bombing his land; his broadsheet, “Songes et Mensonges de Franco,” he sold in postcard format for charity; he gave “Guernica” for propaganda to the Spanish Pavilion in the Paris Exposition; in optimism, he gave big sums to the Spanish government to buy planes; and finally, in defeat, he gave money to the Spanish refugees in the French border camps. The Spanish war furnished a terrible, trite human tableau which distracted Picasso for the first time from a preoccupation with his own visions. Since the Spanish war ended, the only show of Picasso’s paintings in Paris (at the Galerie Rosenberg, his official merchant since the first World War) displayed nearly nothing but peaceful, pretty flowers.

The first major retrospective show of his works ever held in Europe took place in Paris in the spring of 1932 at the Galerie Georges Petit. It was followed by an even larger show in the autumn at Zurich. “Picasso, Forty Years of his Art,” the current retrospective at the Museum of Modern Art here, is the biggest Picasso exposition yet assembled, covers work from 1899 through 1939, and includes three hundred and sixty items, of which one hundred and fifty are canvases. About twenty drawings and originals of book illustrations from private European collections failed to arrive at the last minute owing to the difficulties of shipping since the war. Two of the Gobelin tapestries, as well as a rug Picasso designed, are also shown. He has interested himself in modern crafts, thinks an artist should apply himself to anything stimulating that turns up, has made patterns for linoleums and tile mosaics, and at one time experimented with painting pictures in furniture paint.

According to correct Spanish usage, Picasso should (and occasionally did in his early days) sign his pictures Pablo Ruiz, which is his real name; his father’s name was Ruiz, his mother’s was the Picasso. In the Spanish formula which combines both parents’ names for the child—i.e., Pablo Ruiz y Picasso—the mother’s name is written last. It was her name that Pablo Picasso chose to be known by.

Being an iconoclast, Picasso believes painters should paint in comfort and that French studios are either too hot in summer or too cold in winter. He paints at his ease in a pair of bourgeois Paris apartments at 23 Rue La Boëtie. He and some selected paintings live in the downstairs flat, his palettes and other canvases live upstairs. Though he no longer paints exclusively at night, he is a restless man, always working at or fiddling with something, and his output is tremendous. There are thousands of Picasso canvases now in collections, private hands, or commercial circulation in Europe and America. He also owns stacks of his work which he has never offered to sell; when war broke out in September he stored some of his most valuable canvases in steel safe-deposit closets in a bank. Because he hates sweeping or having things moved, the dust in his atelier is epic, as is the confusion caused by drawings on chairs, sculpture in the corners, paint tubes on the floor, and an assortment of the pretty rubbish painters, like little girls, pick up—lengths of frayed, colored velvet, odd old boxes, stray pieces of once fine furniture from earlier periods.

Because he can never make up his mind what to do with his belongings, Picasso has gradually accumulated five different dwelling places. These he has taken on not as a well-organized man expanding into new forms of life but as somebody irresolute who has hired havens. He has a small weekend house at Le Tremblay; a country property, Boisgeloup, near the medieval Norman town of Gisors; for summer painting he recently acquired his friend Man Ray’s modern penthouse at Antibes. Picasso’s newest Paris dwelling—if he can ever decide to move in—will be on the Rue des Grands-Augustins, where several years ago he rented two floors in the magnificent seventeenth-century mansion which was formerly the town house of the Ducs de Savoie. The place is said to be a noble architectural curiosity, with broken floor levels, nests of small rooms, and sudden great salons. In anticipation of eventual residence, the painter long since installed modern necessities and what he calls his Maginot Line—a grille which cuts across the staircase leading to his front door and would prevent visitors from reaching his doorbell. Friends say he hates hearing his doorbell ring but hates it more when it doesn’t ring at all. Wherever he lives, he lives simply, eats out a lot in small restaurants, and, in the modern intelligentsia French style, as a rule not only entertains his friends but even sometimes writes poetry not at home but in a corner café. His poetry is in the association-surrealist manner.


Picasso’s domestic entourage consists principally of a chauffeur named Marcel and a factotum named Sabartés, who is a friend of long standing and a compatriot. Picasso clings to his well-worn Spanish connections, and has painted portraits of Sabartés, who, in turn, has written articles about the painter. Among those close to Picasso, his despotism, indecisions, hermetically sealed character, and energetic talents arouse a curious loyalty. The painter’s chauffeur can, in a pinch, give the dates of his master’s canvases. Today Picasso’s car, incidentally, has the look of a second-hand elderly Hispano of the kind that seats seven bolt upright, but when he bought it brand-new, at great cost, it seemed like a chariot for Picasso’s brief experiment with luxury.

As a man, Picasso is complicated and more confusing to others than he is to himself. He says that if one took the tendency one likes least in oneself and strengthened it, one would probably have one’s true character. He is indecisive and dominant; he makes promises because people seem to like promises, but he never keeps them. By procrastination he lets circumstances overtake him and solve him along with themselves. Because he is a Spaniard, he takes cruelty for granted, either in art or life. Since he is short, physical strength fascinates him. He greatly admires boxers. He himself has boxed, on two isolated occasions, with Derain and Braque, both big men and amateurs of the sport. He’s fond of animals, has owned kittens, a St. Bernard, a Mexican hairless, and an Afghan hound. His pets are run on the principle that they must look after themselves. He suffers from cold, used to wear a coat that hung to his heels, likes only the hot Spanish climate, and formerly complained that the chillier French landscape smelled of mushrooms. He is not a concertgoer; when young he said he knew nothing of music and didn’t understand it. He is kind to young painters, visits their expositions, hears their questions out, and gives no advice. He would rather be praised by them than by the art critics.

In speech he is discursive except on big topics; then he eagerly treats himself and the listener as if they were two problems entitled to a solution. Miss Toklas says his conversation is flabbergasting and that he is invariably willing to be proud, even at a sacrifice. Racially and constitutionally, he is a tragic-minded man, sad, sarcastic, with malice in speech taking the place of wit. His most-quoted phrases are usually too libellous to print. When he quarrels with friends, the reconciliations have to be arranged in the complicated Latin manner. He is a hypochondriac who has a little kidney trouble. He has small, handsome hands and feet which please him, and a rebellious, pendent lock of hair which, as the French say, cuts his forehead like a scar. His eyes are remarkable; he has a wild little right eye like a Spanish bull’s and a kinder, larger, and more human left eye. When he enters a room his brown glance seems to register everything in it in a sudden inclusive flash, like a photographer’s lens taking a group photograph. Once, when he was looking at some Rembrandt etchings, the owner said it was as if Picasso’s stare would pull the lines off the paper, the way the sun’s heat dries up the pattern of moisture on an old leaf.

There was a period in the nineteen twenties when, whirled along by the fashionableness of the postwar Russian Ballet, Picasso frequented that mixed artistic, monied, demi-aristocratic, semi-mondain Paris circle called le beau monde, where he was a welcome figure, since personalities were the rage. In the last two years, Picasso has been principally seen in public at the St. Germain-des-Prés café tables of the Flore. The small group most often seen with him include serene Paul Eluard, the surrealist poet; Madame Apollinaire, and the Cahiers d’Art editorial group, who are the painter’s art publishers. Even in a crowded café there is a feeling of dominance, abundance, and experience concentrated in the dark presence of Picasso. In his absence, what he may be doing or has done is a source of apparently stimulating speculation to his devotees. Is he painting or is he only drawing today? Did he wear his new gay tie yesterday? What did he say last week and who wrote it down—for his group first, and for posterity second? For many admirers, and with his multiple professional achievements as warrant, Picasso emanates the aura of genius in which they like to reside, though all they get out of it is proximity.

He is generous to his poor friends; he offers them gifts in kind rather than money, perhaps out of respect for Iberian standards of friendship, perhaps out of respect for cold cash. He gives hams, wine, invitations to dinner, and, above all, he gives his valuable drawings, which the friends can sell when they are in distress. Though he once refused to sign a series of new etchings because he wasn’t satisfied with it, for a poor friend with a once-signed old etching which dealers declared was a forgery, Picasso re-signed “Picasso, Picasso, Picasso” all over the margin. Because he asks—and gets—the highest prices, his enemies say he is money-mad. What he says about this is, like everything he says, full of common sense. “I am anti-commercial,” he says, meaning that he is against the merchant-inflated art market, “but I am interested in money because I know what I want to do with it.” When he sells a new picture these days the price is usually around $5,000. If its period becomes popular, the chances are that its value will increase, although not indefinitely, at the rate of a hundred per cent a decade. A good Picasso of the Harlequin or Rose Period, for instance, now brings about $15,000. Since Picasso himself says that he has painted in his lifetime about four thousand pictures, an efficiency expert could compute that he turns out an average of two pictures a week.

He says a painting has an integral life of its own when it is being worked on; thus he was not surprised when he started painting a portrait of the poet Jean Cocteau and it turned into a picture of some girls rolling hoops. “I act with paintings the way I act with things,” he says. “I make a window the way I look through a window. If the open window isn’t any good in my picture, I paint a curtain and close the window the way I would in a room.” He also says, abstrusely, that before he came along painting had been the sum of additions but his painting is the sum of destructions. When an intrepid American lady asked him what his painting was supposed to mean, he answered, “Madame, on ne parle pas au pilote.” Usually all he will say is that a painting means whatever the person looking at it sees for himself. Picasso can, if he chooses, still draw perfectly in the academic manner. When somebody said he drew better than Raphael, he said that might be all very well but what he would prefer to hear was that he had a right to draw as he pleased even if it was the opposite of Raphael. He has a detached attitude about the future of his work. Of a painting of his which he considered bad but which he had sold, he said calmly, “Time will sort all those things out. . . . A picture lives by its legend, not by anything else.” One of the strangest pictures in the Picasso legend is one belonging to the Spanish painter Zuloaga; it is a Picasso painted in his teens. It is of a pretty Harrison Fisher type of girl with pink cheeks and a stylish hat.

Picasso is his own type of genius. “Work,” he says sombrely, “is a necessity for man. Man invented the alarm clock.”

Janet Flanner

16.5.22

A stunning selection of Masterpieces in May!



The major sales in May will be offering works from a number of exceptional collections including the Macklowe, the Ammann, the Anne H. Bass, the Maezawa and even the Gersten and Jacobs collections. So important are these collections that the sale of their “nuggets” promises to revise several global auction records! An Andy Warhol Marilyn is expected to fetch $200 million and a painting by Basquiat is expected at $70 million. Below we take a quick look at 10 very important works coming to auction in May.

Andy Warhol: $195 million (Christie’s, May 9)
Andy WARHOL is now the most expensive painter after Leonardo da Vinci and ahead of Picasso! It’s official since yesterday, with the sale of Shot Sage Blue Marilyn (1964) for $195m at Christie’s…

This iconic canvas pays homage to Marilyn Monroe, a personality whose duality fascinated Warhol. Highly glamorous, she embodied the archetype of feminine beauty of her era, but appeared to live a tragic life. For Shot Sage Blue Marilyn, Andy Warhol used a promotional photo from the 1953 film Niagara and gave the actress a pink face, blue eyeshadow and red lips against a light blue background. The work dates from 1964, two years after the actress’s mysterious death.

From the collection of Thomas and Doris Ammann, Shot Sage Blue Marilyn could mark a turning point in the history of the art market, being presented by Christie’s both as “the absolute pinnacle of American pop” and as one of the greatest paintings of all time, “alongside Botticelli’s Birth of Venus, da Vinci’s Mona Lisa and Picasso’s Demoiselle d’Avignon”.

Expected to refresh Warhol’s current auction record of $105.4 million (Silver Car Crash (Double Disaster) (1963) at Sotheby’s New York in 2013), Shot Sage Blue Marilyn could become the most expensive 20th century artwork ever sold at auction!

Van Gogh: $45 million (Christie’s, May 11)
Fields near the Alpilles is an oil-on-canvas executed in November 1889, six months after Vincent VAN GOGH mutilated his ear. He painted the work at the time of his voluntary internment in Saint-Rémy-de-Provence, then sent the canvas to his friend Joseph Roulin. The work has remained in private hands ever since and has never been exhibited to the public. It should sell for around $45 million.



Jackson Pollock: $45 million (Christie’s, May 12)
Canvas Number 31 dates from 1949, shortly after Jackson POLLOCK had dropped his brushes to devote himself to Action Painting and upset the framework of traditional pictorial practices in the process. In charge of 20th and 21st century art at Christie’s, Alex Rotter recalls that “true dripping paintings were – and still are – the ultimate in mid-century American avant-garde, and it is rare to see them appear on the secondary market”. A rarity that could attract 45 million dollars on May 12 according to the estimate provided by François Pinault’s auction house.

Having remained in the same private collection for more than two decades, Number 31 sold for $3.5 million in 1988 at Christie’s. This painting could now sell for 13 times that amount. To beat Pollock’s current auction record, Number 31 will have to exceed the $61.1 million reached last November by Number 17 (1951), a painting from the Macklowe Collection sold at Sotheby’s.

Claude Monet: $150 million in three lots (Christie’s, May 12)
The collection of American investor Anne H. Bass is impressive. Christie’s has been awarded the honor of dispersing 12 of its masterpieces on May 12, including three paintings by Claude MONET which should bring in, together, 150 million dollars. Two of them – Le Parlement, soleil couchant et Peupliers au bord de l’Epte, automne – were purchased from the Acquavella gallery in 1982; the third – a hypnotic Water-lilies in spring colors – was acquired from Wildenstein New York in 1984.

The highest estimate has been given to Le Parlement, soleil couchant (1900-1903) which is expected to reach $60 million. It is one of the four paintings of the British Parliament in private hands, but above all one of Monet’s finest achievements, being among the most colorful of the series he began in London in 1899 and completed in Giverny in 1904. The future owner of this canvas will own a Monet on a level equivalent to those present in museums such as the Musée d’Orsay in Paris, the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York and the National Gallery of Art in Washington.



Mark Rothko: $80 million (Christie’s, May 12)
Also from the Anne H. Bass collection, a flamboyant Mark ROTHKO from 1961 is estimated between $60 and $80 million. But if it exceeds its high estimate, this marvelous canvas could renew the American artist’s auction record which has stood at nearly $87 million since a canvas painted in the same year and with a similar, but slightly larger, chromatic range, Orange, Red, Yellow (1961), sold at Christie’s New York on 8 May 2012. Having guaranteed a minimum price to the seller, the stakes are high for Christie’s.


Man Ray: $7 million (Christie’s, May 14)
Another record that could be broken concerns the art photography market as a whole. On May 14 Christie’s will be offering MAN RAY’s iconic photograph “Le Violon d’Ingres”. Having spent 60 years in the same collection, the curves of this woman-violin (whose model is none other than Kiki de Montparnasse) are estimated to attract between 5 and 7 million dollars.

The image is on track to smash Man Ray’s record of $3.1 million for a photographic work, a record hammered for his Noire et Blanche (1926) at Christie’s Paris in 2017. But even if it reaches its low estimate it will become the most expensive photographic work ever sold at auction. Excluding Jeff Koons’ photographic portrait under a light box which fetched $9.4 million in 2013, the global auction record for a photographic artwork is currently held by Andreas Gursky’s Rhein II which fetched $4.3 million at Christie’s in New York in 2011.



Pablo Picasso: $60 million (Sotheby’s, May 17)
Pablo PICASSO is the star of Sotheby’s Modern Art sale on May 17 with a canvas expected to fetch around 60 million dollars. It’s a 1932 portrait of Marie-Thérèse Walter with whom the artist fell in love five years earlier (when she was 17 and he was 45). In Femme nue couchée, Walter takes on the contours of a sensual creature by the sea in a Surrealist setting.

Philip Guston: $30 million (Sotheby’s, May 17)
Nile is a monumental work that represents the pinnacle of Philip GUSTON’s abstract practice and, according to Sotheby’s catalog note, it is among the works that established the artist’s reputation “in the foremost rank of the preeminent art movement of the twentieth century, Abstract Expressionism”. On May 17, Sotheby’s is hoping to revise Guston’s auction record with a result above $30 million.

Remaining in the Dallas-based collection of Peter and Edith O’Donnell for over 40 years, the presentation of Nile is certainly timely with the opening of the “Philip Guston Now” exhibition at the Boston Museum of Fine Arts in early May.
$70 million Basquiat (Phillips, May 18)

Phillips (which posted a record turnover of $706 million in 2021 from art sales) could attract the best bid of its history on May 18 with a major 1982 canvas by Jean-Michel BASQUIAT from the collection of Japanese billionaire Yusaku Maezawa. If it reaches the estimated $70 million, Mr. Maezawa, its Japanese billionaire owner, will pocket around $10 million having acquired the canvas at Christie’s for $57.3 million in 2016. The following year, he bought another work by Basquiat for $110.5 million (Sotheby’s), setting the American artist’s all-time auction record.

Michelangelo: $30 million (Christie’s, May 18)
“Rare” would be an understatement! Only eight drawings by MICHELANGELO (1475-1564) have been offered at auction in the past 40 years. Here is the ninth: an early drawing from the 1490s inspired by Masaccio’s frescoes in the Brancacci Chapel in Florence. Above all, It was the artist’s first known ‘academic’ Nude, rediscovered in a French collection.

In 1907 the drawing was presented for sale at the Hôtel Drouot in Paris as a work by “a member of Michelangelo’s entourage”. It was finally recognized as a veritable Michelangelo work in 2019 by Furio Rinaldi, then a specialist in Christie’s Old Master Drawings department.

Fewer than ten of the artist’s works are still in private hands around the world, so the sale of this 33 × 20 cm sheet takes on an exceptional character that Christie’s is highlighting by dedicating a sale uniquely to this work. The rare bidders will battle it out in Paris on May 18 and this incredible “jewel” is expected at fetch around $30 million.

13.5.21

10 People & Things Connecting Pablo Picasso With Russia


Russian collectors and avant-garde artists recognized Picasso as a formidable figure in 20th century art early on, while present-day visitors to the Pushkin Museum in Moscow and the Hermitage in St. Petersburg eagerly rush to the rooms where his works are displayed. Interestingly, Picasso had far more connections with Russia than one might think.

1. Art collectors
Picasso Room in Shchukin's house.Heritage Images/Getty Images

In 1908, Henri Matisse and a Russian art buyer visited Picasso's studio together. The latter selected two paintings, including Queen Isabeau, and paid generously for both. For the artist, who at the time was rather hard-up, the appearance of this buyer, named Sergei Shchukin, was a godsend. Over a period of six years, the Russian philanthropist bought more than 50 works by Picasso from his Cubist, Rose and Blue periods, including Woman with a Fan and The Absinthe Drinker. 

His collection of Picasso’s works effectively became the largest in the world. Another famous Russian art collector, Ivan Morozov, showed an interest in Picasso's works as well, acquiring two prominent paintings—Girl on a Ball and Harlequin and His Companion. After the Bolshevik Revolution, Shchukin's and Morozov's collections were nationalized and the Museum of New Western Art was established on their basis. It existed until 1948, when its collection was divided between the Pushkin Museum and the Hermitage.

2. Monograph
Alexandra Exter, 1917, Pikasso I Okrestnosti (Picasso and Environs), Moscow, Tsentrifuga.Shapiro Auctions

The first ever monograph about the artist was published in Russia in 1917. In his paper "Picasso and the Environs," the poet and art critic Ivan Aksyonov, a member of the Centrifuge futuristic association, wanted, as he put it, to warn the public about what they should not be searching for in the Spaniard's works and how they should look at them. Aksyonov must have either visited Paris and met Picasso shortly before the start of World War I, or his source could have been Alexandra Exter, an avant-garde artist who lived in Paris and was familiar with local art criticism (and who, incidentally, designed the cover for his book).

3. Pupils
Tatlin's Corner Counter-Relief.Heritage Images/Getty Images

Russian avant-garde artists admired Picasso's work, although they had to do so from a distance since the Spaniard was a figure beyond their reach. But then again, what do limitations that even mean to somebody who is passionate about art? In 1914, the artist Vladimir Tatlin traveled to Berlin as a member of a bandura ensemble performing at an exhibition of Russian art. But Berlin was not in fact his final destination. Tatlin dreamed of going to Paris and meeting his idol, and in the end he actually managed to do so. 

According to one version of events, it was all thanks to Marc Chagall, while according to another he succeeded solely on his own resourcefulness. Tatlin put on some eye-catching clothes and settled down with his bandura outside Picasso's studio. Picasso noticed this unusual character and invited him in to sit for a painting. The moment the Spaniard left the room, Tatlin began to frantically make sketches of everything he saw around him until Picasso returned and kicked the "sitter" out. According to another theory, Tatlin admired Picasso so much that when they met, he immediately offered to become his servant in the hope of finding a way to discover the secret of his genius. Whatever actually took place in reality, Tatlin regarded Picasso as his teacher and after his return from Paris focused on creating counter-reliefs.

4. Ballet
Costume design by Pablo Picasso for Serge Diaghilev's Ballets Russes performance of Parade at Théâtre du Châtelet in Paris 18 May, 1917.Public domain

In the spring of 1917, Sergei Diaghilev's Ballets Russes had a new production at the Théâtre du Châtelet in Paris. This time the famous impresario had decided to combine art, ballet and poetry into the one-act ballet Parade. The ballet, which was based on poems by Jean Cocteau, was created by choreographer Leonide Massine and composer Erik Satie, while the scenery, costumes and the circus-inspired curtain were designed by Pablo Picasso.

The result exceeded all expectations. Instead of ballet tutus, the dancers were dressed in bulky costumes made of papier-mâché, wood and metal, which were so uncomfortable that any attempt at movement in them looked mechanical and awkward. Against the background of Cubist scenery, the dancers were transformed into moving fragments of a collage. Thus Cubism made its first foray into the world of theater, while Parade became one of the first Surrealist events.

5. Composer Igor Stravinsky
Sketch of Famous Composer Igor Stravinsky by Pablo Picasso.Bettmann/Getty Images

To prepare the sets and costumes for Parade, Picasso went to Rome, where he met Igor Stravinsky. They became friends, and their soon friendship evolved into professional collaboration when Picasso worked as a designer on Stravinsky's ballet Pulcinella and painted several portraits of the musician. 

Stravinsky tried to take one of these with him to Switzerland, but border officials demanded to know what it was and refused to believe that it was a pencil drawing by a famous artist since it looked more like a blueprint. The composer agreed that Picasso's work was indeed nothing more than a blueprint of his face. In the end, the portrait had to be sent by diplomatic mail through the British Embassy.

6. Wife and son
Pablo Picasso and Olga Khokhlova in the painting studio in London, 1919.Heritage Images/Getty Images

In Rome, Picasso met Olga Khokhlova, a ballerina with Diaghilev's Ballets Russes. Picasso and Khokhlova got married in the summer of 1918. The ceremony took place at the Russian Orthodox Cathedral in Paris and was attended by, among others, Gertrude Stein and Sergei Diaghilev. In 1921, the couple had a son, Paulo, and in 1935 they split up, although they never officially got divorced.

7. Author Ilya Ehrenburg
Ullstein Bild/Getty Images

Picasso became friends with the writer Ilya Ehrenburg in 1914. Ehrenburg admired what he described as the "destructive power" of Picasso's art, and he half-jokingly called the Spaniard a good devil. 

Picasso once decided to paint a portrait of Ehrenburg, but just as the latter made himself comfortable in an armchair preparing to pose, Picasso announced that he was finished. Ehrenburg was surprised at how quickly the portrait was finished, to which Pablo laughingly replied they had after all known each other for more than 40 years, and all this time had been training for how to paint portraits in just five minutes.

8. The first exhibition of Western avant-garde art in the USSR
Exhibition of Pablo Picasso in Moscow.Emmanuel Evzerikhin/TASS/Russia in photo

It was Ehrenburg who introduced the Soviet public to Picasso and helped organize exhibitions of his work in the Pushkin Museum and the Hermitage in 1956. 

The exhibitions became a harbinger of the approaching political thaw, with such enormous excitement around them that people would stand in line all night long in order to get in. Ehrenburg famously tried to reassure the public with the line, "You have waited for this exhibition for 25 years, can you wait for 25 more minutes please?"

9. Stalin portrait
Archive photo

In the Soviet Union, Picasso was sometimes referred to as "Comrade Pablo" since he joined the French Communist Party in 1944. That was his way of protesting against the war and horrors perpetrated by the Franco regime in his native Spain. When Joseph Stalin died in 1953, Picasso painted his portrait, but to the communists' outrage he depicted Stalin as a young man. 

This turned into something of a scandal when members of the French Communist Party voiced their indignation that Stalin had been presented in a non-canonical image. For his part, the poet Louis Aragon, who was editor-in-chief of Les Lettres Françaises, which had printed the portrait, reproached his friend: "Stalin cannot be invented."

10. Lenin Prize
A poster for World Congress of Partisans for Peace, 1949.Legion Media

In 1949, Paris hosted a World Congress of Partisans for Peace, and Picasso created a poster depicting a dove for the forum. The symbol soon became globally famous, and the artist would use it many times afterwards. In 1962, he was awarded the Lenin Peace Prize, which was brought to him in Mougins in France by his friend Ilya Ehrenburg.


Anna Popova