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拍品專文
Nu debout et femmes assises is among the finest of an important series of grisaille double-portraits of his mistress and muse Dora Maar that Picasso made in the coastal resort of Royan near Bordeaux shortly after the outbreak of the Second World War. Responding to the traumatic news of the German invasion of Poland, Picasso had hurriedly fled Paris on 1 September 1939 for the comparative safety of the town of Royan on the French Atlantic Coast. There amidst the gloom of the news of the outbreak of war between France and Germany, he set to work on a series of pictures almost all of which he executed in the grim, grisaille colours he had used for Guernica (1937, Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofía, Madrid) and would again use for Le charnier (The Museum of Modern Art, New York) in 1944-1945. ‘I have not painted the war because I am not the kind of painter who goes out like a photographer for something to depict,’ Picasso would later say of his work of these years, ‘But I have no doubt that the war is in these paintings that I have done’ (quoted in P.D. Whitney, ‘Picasso is Safe,’ in San Francisco Chronicle, 3 September 1944, in S.A. Nash, ed., Picasso and the War Years 1937-1945, exh. cat., Fine Arts Museum of San Francisco, 1998, p. 13).
Between 1939 and 1944, Dora Maar became the primary vehicle through which Picasso would often express the trauma, deprivation, anxiety and dullness of the years of war and Occupation. As Elizabeth Cowling has written, the origins of this tendency began in Royan immediately after the outbreak of war in September 1939. ‘These months in Royan,’ she records, ‘were very productive, the constant pressure of mortal danger spurring Picasso on to find a way of visualizing the common anguish without resorting either to anecdote or reportage’ (Picasso: Style and Meaning, London, 2002, p. 616).
In a car driven by his loyal chauffeur Marcel, Picasso and Maar, along with Jaime Sabartés and his wife, and Picasso’s Afghan hound Kazbek, had all hurriedly left Paris together on 1 September 1939, driving overnight in a panic straight for Royan. There, barring a few short bureaucratic return trips to Paris, Picasso was to live and work until August 1940.
Picasso had chosen Royan because it was a place sufficiently remote and yet also near enough to keep in touch with Paris, and because, since July, it was there that he had ensconced his other mistress, Marie-Thérèse Walter. On arrival, Picasso, Maar and Sabartés moved into the small Hôtel du Tigre in the centre of town. As Roland Penrose, who was close to Picasso around this time, recalled, ‘the rooms in which he lived for the next few months were cramped and badly lit. The town itself apart from its harbour had few attractions. Accepting the situation, however, he settled down to a regular routine in which the main factor, work, was punctuated with meals and walks around the town, accompanied by Dora Maar, Sabartès and the docile Kasbec’ (Picasso: His Life and Work, London, 1958, p. 292).
Picasso’s life was, in fact, a little more complex than this due to the continuing balancing act he was performing between Dora Maar and Marie-Thérèse, to whom he had explained away his separate rooms in the Hôtel du Tigre as ‘a necessary studio.’ In reality, it was Maar who was using their room at the Hôtel du Tigre to paint while Picasso had set up a studio for himself in a small dining room at the Villa Gerbier de Jonc where Marie-Therese, her mother, sister, and her daughter with Picasso, Maya, had been living since July. As John Richardson has written, ‘Dora remembered Royan as hell…she was miserable from nearly the moment they arrived. [She] soon realised why Picasso was always disappearing to the nearby Villa Gerbier de Jonc…[Picasso’s studio there] was a small and dark, shaded by trees that lined the street, hence the smallish size of most of his canvases for the next six months’ (A Life of Picasso, The Minotaur Years 1933-1943, New York, 2021, volume IV, p.195).
It was there, between 21 September and 1 October, hunched over a chair in the dining room of the Villa Gerbier de Jonc that Picasso painted Nu debout et femmes assises and the series of pictures to which it belongs. In his memoirs of this period, Jaime Sabartés has reported that he repeatedly encouraged the artist to acquire an easel to aid his working practice at this time. For a long time, Picasso resisted, choosing deliberately to work in this cramped fashion hunched over the small canvases that he had set up on a chair.
The very first pictures that Picasso had painted in Royan were a small series of grisaille horses inspired by those he had seen being rounded up for military enlistment on his journey down from Paris with Sabartés. Reminiscent in some respects of his frightened horse in Guernica, these horses, ‘with their submissive air... as if on their way to the slaughterhouse,’ (op. cit., 2002, p. 617), had evidently struck Picasso as symbolic of the awful tragedy he was powerless to avert, and must also have reminded him vividly of the First World War, in which horses had played such an instrumental and sacrificial role. Picasso followed these pictures with the sequence of eight or nine double portraits of women (predominantly Maar), to which Nu debout et femmes assises belongs, and then by a very Goya-esque sequence of pictures of sheep’s skulls based on those he was buying to feed Kazbek. ‘It is natural,’ as Cowling has written, ‘to read [these works] as stand-ins for mankind and for the suffering and sacrifice of the innocent’ (ibid., p. 617).
These motifs subsequently developed into an ultimately failed series of attempts to paint a portentous picture of a woman holding a skull before, ultimately, in 1940, giving rise to his greatest masterpiece of the Royan period, his Grand nu assis (Femme se coiffant) of 1940, (now in The Museum of Modern Art, New York). The roots of this famous painting of a monstrous, naked, Dora Maar sitting squirming and twisting in a sinister confined space derive from a series of sketches Picasso made during his first months in Royan when he was working on Nu debout et femmes assises, and from the series of double portraits of seated and standing depictions of Maar to which it belongs.
In Nu debout et femmes assises, Picasso depicts a standing nude Maar alongside a clothed portrait of her seated in the kind of chair to which he would confine her throughout much of the wartime period. For Picasso, the chair could often become an instrument of confinement and even torture. As he would later confess about his pictures of Maar, ‘for years I’ve painted her 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 B. Léal, ‘“For Charming Dora”: Portraits of Dora Maar,’ in Picasso and Portraiture, exh. cat., The Museum of Modern Art, New York, 1996, p. 395). Maar was, he said, ‘for me... always a weeping woman. And it’s important, because women are suffering machines... When I paint a woman in an armchair, the armchair implies old age or death, right? So, too bad for her’ (quoted in A. Malraux, Picasso’s Mask, New York, 1976, p. 138).
Given this context, Nu debout et femmes assises, like many of the works in the series, such as Nu debout et femme assise of 22 September 1939 (now in the Musée national Picasso, Paris), presents a deliberate play of polarities which in its stark contrasting of a standing nude against a clothed, seated figure, assumes an existential dimension. Indeed, the ultimate effect of this elegant but also grisaille, portrayal of physical opposites is one that appears also to speak of the schizophrenic nature of the time in which it was made. Removed from his life in Paris like an exile in his own adoptive home, awaiting the result of a war in which he could play no part and living between two lovers in a small seaside town, Picasso’s life was, for the moment, also split in two.
The polarised theme of the two women that manifested briefly in these works was, however, short-lived. As Elizabeth Cowling has pointed out, the doubling theme of these works was ‘not pursued further after [a] grisaille version of 29 September. The motif now breaks down into its components: into the pictorial themes of a [single] naked seated and a naked standing female figure. The first sketchy notes of a naked woman combing her hair can already be found in a carnet used in Royan between 30 September and 29 October, 1939. All sketches depict a repulsively alienated, standing female nude arranging her hair’ (op cit., 2002, p. 617). These sketches were the ones that ultimately gave rise in the summer of 1940 to the definitive naked portrait of Maar tormented and twisting in many different directions in Grand nu assis (Femme se coiffant).
Between 1939 and 1944, Dora Maar became the primary vehicle through which Picasso would often express the trauma, deprivation, anxiety and dullness of the years of war and Occupation. As Elizabeth Cowling has written, the origins of this tendency began in Royan immediately after the outbreak of war in September 1939. ‘These months in Royan,’ she records, ‘were very productive, the constant pressure of mortal danger spurring Picasso on to find a way of visualizing the common anguish without resorting either to anecdote or reportage’ (Picasso: Style and Meaning, London, 2002, p. 616).
In a car driven by his loyal chauffeur Marcel, Picasso and Maar, along with Jaime Sabartés and his wife, and Picasso’s Afghan hound Kazbek, had all hurriedly left Paris together on 1 September 1939, driving overnight in a panic straight for Royan. There, barring a few short bureaucratic return trips to Paris, Picasso was to live and work until August 1940.
Picasso had chosen Royan because it was a place sufficiently remote and yet also near enough to keep in touch with Paris, and because, since July, it was there that he had ensconced his other mistress, Marie-Thérèse Walter. On arrival, Picasso, Maar and Sabartés moved into the small Hôtel du Tigre in the centre of town. As Roland Penrose, who was close to Picasso around this time, recalled, ‘the rooms in which he lived for the next few months were cramped and badly lit. The town itself apart from its harbour had few attractions. Accepting the situation, however, he settled down to a regular routine in which the main factor, work, was punctuated with meals and walks around the town, accompanied by Dora Maar, Sabartès and the docile Kasbec’ (Picasso: His Life and Work, London, 1958, p. 292).
Picasso’s life was, in fact, a little more complex than this due to the continuing balancing act he was performing between Dora Maar and Marie-Thérèse, to whom he had explained away his separate rooms in the Hôtel du Tigre as ‘a necessary studio.’ In reality, it was Maar who was using their room at the Hôtel du Tigre to paint while Picasso had set up a studio for himself in a small dining room at the Villa Gerbier de Jonc where Marie-Therese, her mother, sister, and her daughter with Picasso, Maya, had been living since July. As John Richardson has written, ‘Dora remembered Royan as hell…she was miserable from nearly the moment they arrived. [She] soon realised why Picasso was always disappearing to the nearby Villa Gerbier de Jonc…[Picasso’s studio there] was a small and dark, shaded by trees that lined the street, hence the smallish size of most of his canvases for the next six months’ (A Life of Picasso, The Minotaur Years 1933-1943, New York, 2021, volume IV, p.195).
It was there, between 21 September and 1 October, hunched over a chair in the dining room of the Villa Gerbier de Jonc that Picasso painted Nu debout et femmes assises and the series of pictures to which it belongs. In his memoirs of this period, Jaime Sabartés has reported that he repeatedly encouraged the artist to acquire an easel to aid his working practice at this time. For a long time, Picasso resisted, choosing deliberately to work in this cramped fashion hunched over the small canvases that he had set up on a chair.
The very first pictures that Picasso had painted in Royan were a small series of grisaille horses inspired by those he had seen being rounded up for military enlistment on his journey down from Paris with Sabartés. Reminiscent in some respects of his frightened horse in Guernica, these horses, ‘with their submissive air... as if on their way to the slaughterhouse,’ (op. cit., 2002, p. 617), had evidently struck Picasso as symbolic of the awful tragedy he was powerless to avert, and must also have reminded him vividly of the First World War, in which horses had played such an instrumental and sacrificial role. Picasso followed these pictures with the sequence of eight or nine double portraits of women (predominantly Maar), to which Nu debout et femmes assises belongs, and then by a very Goya-esque sequence of pictures of sheep’s skulls based on those he was buying to feed Kazbek. ‘It is natural,’ as Cowling has written, ‘to read [these works] as stand-ins for mankind and for the suffering and sacrifice of the innocent’ (ibid., p. 617).
These motifs subsequently developed into an ultimately failed series of attempts to paint a portentous picture of a woman holding a skull before, ultimately, in 1940, giving rise to his greatest masterpiece of the Royan period, his Grand nu assis (Femme se coiffant) of 1940, (now in The Museum of Modern Art, New York). The roots of this famous painting of a monstrous, naked, Dora Maar sitting squirming and twisting in a sinister confined space derive from a series of sketches Picasso made during his first months in Royan when he was working on Nu debout et femmes assises, and from the series of double portraits of seated and standing depictions of Maar to which it belongs.
In Nu debout et femmes assises, Picasso depicts a standing nude Maar alongside a clothed portrait of her seated in the kind of chair to which he would confine her throughout much of the wartime period. For Picasso, the chair could often become an instrument of confinement and even torture. As he would later confess about his pictures of Maar, ‘for years I’ve painted her 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 B. Léal, ‘“For Charming Dora”: Portraits of Dora Maar,’ in Picasso and Portraiture, exh. cat., The Museum of Modern Art, New York, 1996, p. 395). Maar was, he said, ‘for me... always a weeping woman. And it’s important, because women are suffering machines... When I paint a woman in an armchair, the armchair implies old age or death, right? So, too bad for her’ (quoted in A. Malraux, Picasso’s Mask, New York, 1976, p. 138).
Given this context, Nu debout et femmes assises, like many of the works in the series, such as Nu debout et femme assise of 22 September 1939 (now in the Musée national Picasso, Paris), presents a deliberate play of polarities which in its stark contrasting of a standing nude against a clothed, seated figure, assumes an existential dimension. Indeed, the ultimate effect of this elegant but also grisaille, portrayal of physical opposites is one that appears also to speak of the schizophrenic nature of the time in which it was made. Removed from his life in Paris like an exile in his own adoptive home, awaiting the result of a war in which he could play no part and living between two lovers in a small seaside town, Picasso’s life was, for the moment, also split in two.
The polarised theme of the two women that manifested briefly in these works was, however, short-lived. As Elizabeth Cowling has pointed out, the doubling theme of these works was ‘not pursued further after [a] grisaille version of 29 September. The motif now breaks down into its components: into the pictorial themes of a [single] naked seated and a naked standing female figure. The first sketchy notes of a naked woman combing her hair can already be found in a carnet used in Royan between 30 September and 29 October, 1939. All sketches depict a repulsively alienated, standing female nude arranging her hair’ (op cit., 2002, p. 617). These sketches were the ones that ultimately gave rise in the summer of 1940 to the definitive naked portrait of Maar tormented and twisting in many different directions in Grand nu assis (Femme se coiffant).