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Lot Essay
For Pablo Picasso, there was no subject as fundamental and immediately relevant to the daily travail of a painter as that of the vital exchange between the artist and his model. Between 1963-1965, Picasso devoted himself almost exclusively to this theme in his art, producing an extended sequence of oil paintings that offered intriguing variations and evolutions of the subject, each delving into this stimulating relationship and the way that it informed and underpinned the creative process. Though the theme of the artist and model had woven its way through the various strands of Picasso’s multi-faceted oeuvre through the years, never before had the artist explored the subject so closely and with such intensity. Le peintre et son modèle is a quintessential example of this great series, executed on an unusually large scale in the late autumn of 1964. Painted in bold, gestural strokes of pigment, the composition captures the energy and immediacy of Picasso’s painterly style during these years, as he sought to record the flow of ideas and images that poured forth from his imagination.
For Picasso, the return of the artist and model subject in his work, and the associated atelier scenes, often signalled an important change or transition in his art. In the 1960s, they marked the end of a decade long engagement with the legacy of his artistic predecessors, in which Picasso analysed and reconsidered some of the most renowned compositions by a coterie of great masters, from Eugène Delacroix and Diego Velázquez, to Edouard Manet and Nicolas Poussin. Turning away from the art of the past, Picasso began to hone in on the very nature of art making itself, examining the essential artistic relationship of the painter and his subject. As if trying to find the key to his own innate abilities as a painter, he focused entirely on the realm of the studio, the private, haloed sanctum of artistic inspiration and creativity. Here, as Marie-Laure Bernadac described, he captured in his canvases ‘the impossible, the secret alchemy that takes place between the real model, the artist’s vision and feeling, and the reality of paint’ (Late Picasso, exh. cat., The Tate Gallery, London, 1988, p. 76).
Over the course of two weeks in February 1963, Picasso filled the pages of a small carnet with more than two dozen sketches of a studio interior, in which a painter is seen working at his easel in the presence of a reclining nude model (Musée Picasso, Carnet no. 59). On 2 March, he began to explore the subject in oils (Zervos, vol. 23, no. 154; Kunstmuseum St. Gallen), marking the beginning of this dynamic series of works that would grip his imagination for two years. Hélène Parmelin, the wife of painter Edouard Pignon, both of whom were close friends of the artist, recounted the excitement surrounding the inception of these works: ‘Picasso lets loose. He paints “The Painter and his Model.” And from that moment on he paints like a madman, perhaps never before with such frenzy’ (Picasso: The Artist and His Model, New York, 1965, p. 10). ‘And now he says he is turning his back on everything,’ Parmelin recorded. ‘He says he is embarking upon an incredible adventure. He says that everything is changed; it is over and done with; painting is completely different from what one had thought – perhaps it is even the opposite. It is a time that he declares himself ready to kill modern “art” – and hence art itself – in order to rediscover painting...’ (ibid., pp. 9-10).
Residing in almost complete seclusion with his wife Jacqueline at Notre-Dame-de-Vie in Mougins during these years, Picasso was able to immerse himself entirely in his work, painting without disturbance for long hours each day. The result was an exuberant burst of creativity that belied the artist’s age, as he produced an astounding body of work that valiantly proclaimed his undiminished powers of creation. Taking great pleasure in the act of painting itself, he allowed process to take prominence over the finished image. ‘It’s the movement of painting that interests me,’ he once explained, ‘the dramatic movement from one effort to the next, even if those efforts are perhaps not pushed to their ultimate end… I’ve reached the moment, you see, when the movement of my thought interests me more than the thought itself’ (quoted in E. Cowling, Picasso: Style and Meaning, London, 2002, p. 640). The resulting works delve into the fundamental connection between the artist and his muse, revelling in the very act of looking itself, and the ways in which the figure could be translated through the artist’s subjective vision, into a paean of the female form.
As the series developed through 1963-1965, Picasso explored different compositional ideas and variations on the central pairing. In many of the works, the artist and model appear together, as in Le peintre et son modèle, highlighting the interaction between the two figures. Here, their gazes connect, their expressions smiling and serene, as they both watch one another. A minimally described brush, palette and the barest suggestion of an easel are discernible in the bottom left corner of the composition, while the artist himself appears to be turning away from his tools to speak to his female companion, who is gently enveloped in folds of blue and white fabric that recall the striped sailor’s shirt the artist was renowned for wearing.
In some works devoted to the theme, the painter is seen alone, quietly contemplating his easel, as he wrestles with translating his vision onto canvas. Other paintings from this period showcase the nude female figure alone, while simultaneously leaving the presence of the artist implied, as if the viewer has been transported into his place and granted the privileged position that he enjoys, looking straight at his model’s sensuous form. Throughout the series, the male subjects are almost invariably stand-ins for Picasso himself, while the models appear to pay homage to the artist’s wife, Jacqueline, whom he had met in the early 1950s, and subsequently married in 1961. Though she never modelled for him in the traditional sense, Jacqueline’s presence permeated every aspect of Picasso’s work, her petite, yet voluptuous, form captivating his imagination and inspiring a myriad of sculptures, drawings, etchings and paintings in her likeness.
Dating to late 1964, Le peintre et son modèle reveals the distinctive shifts that were occurring in Picasso’s painterly style at this moment in time, as his brushstroke became increasingly freer and more gestural, describing his forms through simple, graphic signs. Using large canvases executed in both vertical and horizontal format, his works from these months are marked by a lighter, pastel palette of delicate pale greens and pink or lavender tones, as if painted with the silvery winter Mediterranean light flooding through the windows into the studio. Picasso applies his colours with a heavily loaded brush, modelling his figures’ forms in long, sinuous strokes of pigment, the paintbrush zig-zagging and sweeping across the canvas in broad passages of paint that trace the movement of the artist’s hand. Laid over these hues is a series of black lines that define the essential features of the male painter and female nude, their bodies appearing from an almost cryptogram-like arrangement of lines and shapes that delineate the essential structures of their faces and bodies.
This abbreviated style of painting, which the artist described as écriture-peinture, allowed Picasso to convey the essence of his figures quickly, and with a bold directness. Describing this approach, Marie-Laure Bernadac has explained it was ‘characterised by the juxtaposition of two ways of painting: one elliptical and stenographic, made up of ideograms, codified signs which can be inventoried; the other thick and flowing … Picasso thus combines a painterly form of writing with a painterly form of painting, a material literalism that lays bare and sets free the substance of paint…’ (exh. cat., op. cit., 1988, p. 85). This technique brought his figures back to their essential elements, allowing Picasso to communicate to the viewer through a visual shorthand that prompted them to fill in the rest of the artist and model’s form in their mind’s eye. As Parmelin recalled, ‘Every time [Picasso] shows a canvas in which a dot is enough for a breast, a dash for the painter, five spots of colour for a foot, a few pink or green strokes… he says: “That’s enough, don’t you think? What more do I need to do? What can I add to that? I’ve said it all…’ (Picasso Says, trans. C. Trollope, London, 1966, p. 21).
When considered within the wider artistic moment of the 1960s, Le peintre et son modèle and the rest of this series once again show Picasso as an artist who remained at the very forefront of the avant-garde, continuing to subvert expectations. At this time, abstraction reigned supreme, with Pop art and Minimalism coming increasingly to the fore as dynamic new facets of post-war art. Traditional easel painting, many were suggesting, was redundant and outmoded, its future questionable in a time when industrial materials and mechanical techniques dominated artistic production. Yet, just as he had in the early twentieth century, Picasso defied expectation by remaining resolutely bound to the essential, time-honoured elements and processes of art. His large canvases painted with gestural, lavish strokes of thick colour and strident lines that depict, through timeless subjects of the artist or the model, the very act of painting itself, showed that the medium was far from dead. Indeed, as Picasso argued, it was thriving. ‘There is no abstract art,’ the artist had declared in 1935. ‘You must always start with something. Afterward you can remove all traces of reality. There’s no danger then, anyway, because the idea of the object will have left an indelible mark’ (quoted in K.L. Kleinfelder, The Artist, His Model, Her Image, His Gaze: Picasso’s Pursuit of the Model, Chicago and London, 1993, p. 137).
For Picasso, the return of the artist and model subject in his work, and the associated atelier scenes, often signalled an important change or transition in his art. In the 1960s, they marked the end of a decade long engagement with the legacy of his artistic predecessors, in which Picasso analysed and reconsidered some of the most renowned compositions by a coterie of great masters, from Eugène Delacroix and Diego Velázquez, to Edouard Manet and Nicolas Poussin. Turning away from the art of the past, Picasso began to hone in on the very nature of art making itself, examining the essential artistic relationship of the painter and his subject. As if trying to find the key to his own innate abilities as a painter, he focused entirely on the realm of the studio, the private, haloed sanctum of artistic inspiration and creativity. Here, as Marie-Laure Bernadac described, he captured in his canvases ‘the impossible, the secret alchemy that takes place between the real model, the artist’s vision and feeling, and the reality of paint’ (Late Picasso, exh. cat., The Tate Gallery, London, 1988, p. 76).
Over the course of two weeks in February 1963, Picasso filled the pages of a small carnet with more than two dozen sketches of a studio interior, in which a painter is seen working at his easel in the presence of a reclining nude model (Musée Picasso, Carnet no. 59). On 2 March, he began to explore the subject in oils (Zervos, vol. 23, no. 154; Kunstmuseum St. Gallen), marking the beginning of this dynamic series of works that would grip his imagination for two years. Hélène Parmelin, the wife of painter Edouard Pignon, both of whom were close friends of the artist, recounted the excitement surrounding the inception of these works: ‘Picasso lets loose. He paints “The Painter and his Model.” And from that moment on he paints like a madman, perhaps never before with such frenzy’ (Picasso: The Artist and His Model, New York, 1965, p. 10). ‘And now he says he is turning his back on everything,’ Parmelin recorded. ‘He says he is embarking upon an incredible adventure. He says that everything is changed; it is over and done with; painting is completely different from what one had thought – perhaps it is even the opposite. It is a time that he declares himself ready to kill modern “art” – and hence art itself – in order to rediscover painting...’ (ibid., pp. 9-10).
Residing in almost complete seclusion with his wife Jacqueline at Notre-Dame-de-Vie in Mougins during these years, Picasso was able to immerse himself entirely in his work, painting without disturbance for long hours each day. The result was an exuberant burst of creativity that belied the artist’s age, as he produced an astounding body of work that valiantly proclaimed his undiminished powers of creation. Taking great pleasure in the act of painting itself, he allowed process to take prominence over the finished image. ‘It’s the movement of painting that interests me,’ he once explained, ‘the dramatic movement from one effort to the next, even if those efforts are perhaps not pushed to their ultimate end… I’ve reached the moment, you see, when the movement of my thought interests me more than the thought itself’ (quoted in E. Cowling, Picasso: Style and Meaning, London, 2002, p. 640). The resulting works delve into the fundamental connection between the artist and his muse, revelling in the very act of looking itself, and the ways in which the figure could be translated through the artist’s subjective vision, into a paean of the female form.
As the series developed through 1963-1965, Picasso explored different compositional ideas and variations on the central pairing. In many of the works, the artist and model appear together, as in Le peintre et son modèle, highlighting the interaction between the two figures. Here, their gazes connect, their expressions smiling and serene, as they both watch one another. A minimally described brush, palette and the barest suggestion of an easel are discernible in the bottom left corner of the composition, while the artist himself appears to be turning away from his tools to speak to his female companion, who is gently enveloped in folds of blue and white fabric that recall the striped sailor’s shirt the artist was renowned for wearing.
In some works devoted to the theme, the painter is seen alone, quietly contemplating his easel, as he wrestles with translating his vision onto canvas. Other paintings from this period showcase the nude female figure alone, while simultaneously leaving the presence of the artist implied, as if the viewer has been transported into his place and granted the privileged position that he enjoys, looking straight at his model’s sensuous form. Throughout the series, the male subjects are almost invariably stand-ins for Picasso himself, while the models appear to pay homage to the artist’s wife, Jacqueline, whom he had met in the early 1950s, and subsequently married in 1961. Though she never modelled for him in the traditional sense, Jacqueline’s presence permeated every aspect of Picasso’s work, her petite, yet voluptuous, form captivating his imagination and inspiring a myriad of sculptures, drawings, etchings and paintings in her likeness.
Dating to late 1964, Le peintre et son modèle reveals the distinctive shifts that were occurring in Picasso’s painterly style at this moment in time, as his brushstroke became increasingly freer and more gestural, describing his forms through simple, graphic signs. Using large canvases executed in both vertical and horizontal format, his works from these months are marked by a lighter, pastel palette of delicate pale greens and pink or lavender tones, as if painted with the silvery winter Mediterranean light flooding through the windows into the studio. Picasso applies his colours with a heavily loaded brush, modelling his figures’ forms in long, sinuous strokes of pigment, the paintbrush zig-zagging and sweeping across the canvas in broad passages of paint that trace the movement of the artist’s hand. Laid over these hues is a series of black lines that define the essential features of the male painter and female nude, their bodies appearing from an almost cryptogram-like arrangement of lines and shapes that delineate the essential structures of their faces and bodies.
This abbreviated style of painting, which the artist described as écriture-peinture, allowed Picasso to convey the essence of his figures quickly, and with a bold directness. Describing this approach, Marie-Laure Bernadac has explained it was ‘characterised by the juxtaposition of two ways of painting: one elliptical and stenographic, made up of ideograms, codified signs which can be inventoried; the other thick and flowing … Picasso thus combines a painterly form of writing with a painterly form of painting, a material literalism that lays bare and sets free the substance of paint…’ (exh. cat., op. cit., 1988, p. 85). This technique brought his figures back to their essential elements, allowing Picasso to communicate to the viewer through a visual shorthand that prompted them to fill in the rest of the artist and model’s form in their mind’s eye. As Parmelin recalled, ‘Every time [Picasso] shows a canvas in which a dot is enough for a breast, a dash for the painter, five spots of colour for a foot, a few pink or green strokes… he says: “That’s enough, don’t you think? What more do I need to do? What can I add to that? I’ve said it all…’ (Picasso Says, trans. C. Trollope, London, 1966, p. 21).
When considered within the wider artistic moment of the 1960s, Le peintre et son modèle and the rest of this series once again show Picasso as an artist who remained at the very forefront of the avant-garde, continuing to subvert expectations. At this time, abstraction reigned supreme, with Pop art and Minimalism coming increasingly to the fore as dynamic new facets of post-war art. Traditional easel painting, many were suggesting, was redundant and outmoded, its future questionable in a time when industrial materials and mechanical techniques dominated artistic production. Yet, just as he had in the early twentieth century, Picasso defied expectation by remaining resolutely bound to the essential, time-honoured elements and processes of art. His large canvases painted with gestural, lavish strokes of thick colour and strident lines that depict, through timeless subjects of the artist or the model, the very act of painting itself, showed that the medium was far from dead. Indeed, as Picasso argued, it was thriving. ‘There is no abstract art,’ the artist had declared in 1935. ‘You must always start with something. Afterward you can remove all traces of reality. There’s no danger then, anyway, because the idea of the object will have left an indelible mark’ (quoted in K.L. Kleinfelder, The Artist, His Model, Her Image, His Gaze: Picasso’s Pursuit of the Model, Chicago and London, 1993, p. 137).