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Old Man Praying (Woll 205), 1895, woodcut, 18 3/16 x 13 inches
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La Femme a la Fenêtre 1949 (Bloch 695), Sugarlift aquatint, 32 5/8 x 18 1/2 inches
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Femme Au Fauteuil No 4 (d'aprés le violet) (B588), 1949, lithograph, 27 7/8 x 20 1/2 inches
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B0585 Le Crapaud, (Bloch 585)), 1949, lithograph, 19 1/2 x 25 1/4 inches
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Upper left & right: La Femme au Miroir (Woman at the Mirror) (M197 1st state), 1950, lithograph, 12 3/8 x 19 3/4 inches Lower left & right: La Femme au Miroir (Woman at the Mirror) (M197 each one of five state proofs), 1950, lithograph, 12 1/2 x 18 inches
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Profil de Femme (Bloch 436), 1947, lithograph, 22 1/8 x 15 inches
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La Femme à la Résille (Femme aux Cheveux verts) (Bloch 612), 1949, lithograph, 25 3/4 x 19 3/4 inches
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Portrait de Dora Maar au Chignon. II (Bloch 292), 1936, drypoint, 20 1/4 x 15 3/4 inches
This time last year, Punxsutawney Phil the Groundhog’s shadow was still, as it had been for the prior 133 years, an (albeit minor) national concern – would he see it and condemn us to six more weeks of winter? Or would he be relieved of it, blissfully unaware, and usher in the gleaming promise of an early bloom? And though it turned out to be the latter, we are all acutely aware that the period following Phil’s emergence was quite far from gleaming. As we enter this February, with the significant weight of last year in front of us as much as behind us, it hardly seems worth mentioning that Phil guessed more winter on Tuesday. What is the change of season anyway, if our feelings remain the same? (This sentiment rings more true for us lovers of art than for, say, meteorologists.)
For our long-term readers, looking at the print above may evoke a very Groundhog Day-eque feeling – the Bill Murray kind, not the Phil kind. Haven’t we looked at this print before? Back in December, we introduced to our series a formative figure in Picasso’s life, Dora Maar. At that time, we considered a work from the year they are said to have fallen in love, 1936: Portrait de Dora Maar au chignon (B291). In B291, Dora gazes off the page dreamily, the light catching in her long, feminine eyelashes and appearing to twinkle even on the whiteness of the page. She is idealistic, youthful, ennobled. Part II of that work (B292), pictured above, is a rendering of the very same woman, though crafted with a small difference in characterization. In B292 Dora’s demeanor is changed. She is stonier, dignified. There is a wrinkle to her brow – perhaps it’s consternation (another war was, after all, inching closer and closer to home), or some frustration with her lover, the artist himself. Her round, earnest eyes have turned hard as diamonds: dazzling, intense, a world unto themselves. The shift in the two Doras is as subtle as the change in season – our best clue in the change of days is the sameness of the features; the budding of leaves on boughs days before barren is understandable by the fixedness of the bough. Studying the two prints side-by-side tells us just as much about Dora as about Picasso; they are his diary entries, windows into his world in October of 1936.This story seems somehow continued in Picasso’s 1939 work Femme au fauteuil: Dora Maar (B318). By this time, Dora’s image had become recognizable, the subject of many well-known portraits in print and in paint. As we will discuss further in coming weeks, she was already known as Picasso’s Weeping Woman, so-called for the series of portraits in which her face itself seems disfigured, ripped open by her despair; her emotion is turned inside out. Fittingly, in B318 Dora appears contrary to her depictions a few years before. Whereas before she was spirited, now she is chair-bound, her hair let down from its elegant coif and her dress more matronly than fashionable. One hand is curled around the arm of the chair while the other hangs absently, mirroring the emotion that plays out on her face – one of pointed despair; a sense of absence that feels intentional, performative, as much as it does deeply private. And her eyes – Dora’s most striking, most awe-inspiring feature – are downcast, no longer staring off the page with a rapturous intensity, but further into it. Even the mode of her rendering has changed; Picasso uses aquatint instead of drypoint, in effect reinforcing the much-softened aura of his subject. It is evident that Picasso’s feelings have changed – they’ve deepened, developed; he sees the same features but never the same subject. The seasons change again.
The monotony of the pandemic has made a lot of days feel saturated with sameness. But we look to the diary of Picasso’s art and see that there are differences, small shifts, that can be observable in our day-to-days, too, and we know that they will culminate over time – even (or, especially) when we are looking at the same, beloved features of our lives. We hope that our friends in the American Northeast take a moment to enjoy the snow this week, and we thank our friend Phil for showing up on Tuesday to teach us our yearly lesson, regardless (or, in spite of) the weather.
Take care, and ‘til next week. -
L'Aigle Blanc (The Eagle) (Bloch 340), 1936, sugarlift aquatint, drypoint, and scraper, 14 3/8 x 11 inches
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Tête de Femme de Profil (Bloch 6), 1905, drypoint, 21 5/8 x 15 9/16 inches
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Salomé (Bloch 14), 1939, aquatint, 17 1/2 x 13 1/4 inches
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Tète de femme No. 7. Portrait de Dora Maar(B1336), 1939, aquatint, 17 1/2 x 13 1/4 inches
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Tête de Femme No. 2. Portrait de Dora Maar (B1340), 1939, aquatint, 17 3/4 x 13 1/4 inches
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Le Dindon (The Turkey) B346, 1936, Sugarlift aquatint, drypoint, burin and scraper, 14 3/8 x 11 inches
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Femme au Fauteuil songeuse, la Joue sur la Main (S.V. 21) B218, 1934, engraving, 17 5/8 x 13 5/8 inches
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B0223 Minotaure aveugle guidé dans la Nuit par une Petite Fille au Pigeon (S.V. 96)) (B223), 1934, etching, 15 1/4 x 19 3/4 inches
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Le Repos du Minotaure : Champagne et Amante (S.V. 83), 1933, etching, 15 1/4 x 19 3/4 inches
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Faune dévoilant une Dormeuse (Jupiter et Antiope, d'après Rembrandt) (S.V. 27) (B230), 1936, Sugarlift aquatint and burin with scraper, 13 1/4 x 17 1/2 inches
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Marie-Thérèse en Femme Torero (B220), 1934, etching, 17 5/8 x 13 5/16 inches
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Sculpteur et son modèle devant une fenêtre (B168), 1933, etching, 15 1/4 x 19 3/4 inches
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Portrait de Vollard IV (B233), 1933, etching, 17 1/2 x 12 3/8 inches
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Orphée, ou le poète. II Ba541, 1933 (February 3, Paris), Monotype, 9 7/8 x 6 3/4 inches
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Muse montrant à Marie-Thérèse pensive son Portrait sculpté B257, 1933 (March 17.III, Paris), etching, 16 7/8 x 13 1/4 inches
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Sculpture, Tête de Marie-Thérèse B250, 1933, drypoint, 18 3/8 x 14 1/2 inches
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Visage de Marie-Thérèse B95, 1928 (Probably October, Paris), lithograph, 20 3/8 x 13 1/8 inches
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Portrait d’Olga au Col de Fourrure(Ba109), 1923, drypoint, 30 1/4 x 22 1/8 inches
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La Source / Femme au chien (Z.IV.no.301), 1921, pencil drawing on cream vellum paper, 19 7/16 x 25 1/8 inches
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Pablo Picasso: Parade, 1917
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Portrait de la Fille de Charles Morice, 1906, pencil drawing on paper, 26 3/4 x 18 7/8 inches, John Szoke Gallery Collection
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Apollinaire blessé, 1916, graphite pencil and conté crayon on paper, 31.3 x 23.1 cm
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Pablo Picasso: Les Deux Saltimbanques (Bloch 5), 1905, drypoint, 8 3/8 x 5 1/2 inches
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Pablo Picasso: Picasso, son oeuvre, et son Public B1481, 1968, etching, 22 1/2 x 28 inches
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Left: Max Jacob: Saint Matorel illustrated with etchings by Picasso, 1910, published 1911; Middle: Pablo Picasso: Mademoiselle Léonie, 1910, etching, 7 15/16 x 5 9/16 inches; Right: Pablo Picasso: Mademoiselle Léonie Sur Une Chaise Longue, 1910-1911, etching and drypoint, 7 13/16 x 5 9/16 inches ©MoMA
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Pablo Picasso: Le Singe (The Monkey), 1936, Sugarlift aquatint, drypoint, and scraper, 14 3/8 x 11 inches
When Picasso relocated from the Montmartre-based Bateau Lavoir (shared with Max Jacob, among many other bohemians and artists), he upgraded to the kind of city-center flat affordable to an artist with new money, playing domestic with his then-girlfriend Fernande Olivier. Despite Fernande’s supposedly reigning status in the household, there was only one lady allowed free roam of Picasso’s in-home studio: Monina, his pet monkey.
One can imagine a melancholy Fernande, relatively neglected during this highly productive time in Picasso’s art-making, sighing over her journal as she wrote about Monina, who, “used to eat all her meals with Picasso and pester him incessantly,” though, she admits, “he bore with this and even enjoyed it. He would let her take his cigarette or the fruit he was eating. She would nestle up to his chest, where she felt quite at home.”*
An unexpectedly sweet image: work-absorbed Picasso, punctuating his self-consuming picture-making for a snuggle with his trickster pet monkey. Unlike his other love affairs, Monina is not a major subject of Picasso’s work. Her closest appearance is in Le Singe, a sugarlift aquatint print of a monkey Picasso created later in his career. That monkey is not Monina, but there is a gentle familiarity in its rendering that may speak to an image of her in the artist’s mind – an impression of her, resting against his heart.It leads me to wonder: what kind of person might be uncovered if we read between the lines of Picasso’s visual diaries? We think we know this artist so well, with his anarchic, larger-than-life persona – but who might we discover if we take a step back from these big narratives, and consider the underdogs of his pictures?
Over the next couple of weeks, we seek to find out.
*Olivier, Fernande. Loving Picasso. Harry N. Abrams, 2001. -
Edvard Munch: Kristiania Bohème II W16, 1895, drypoint, 29.7 x 39.5 cm ©Munchmuseet
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Edvard Munch: Kristiania Bohème I W015, 1895, etching, 13 1/2 x 18 7/8 inches.
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Løsrivelse II / Separation II W078, 1896, lithograph, 21 x 30 9/16 inches
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Portrait de Max Jacob, 1953, transfer lithograph, 9 1/2 x 7 1/8 inches
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© David Douglas Duncan
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Left: Edvard Munch: Madonna, 1895-1902, lithograph, 23 5/8 x 17 3/8 inches Right: Edvard Munch: Self-Portrait with Skeleton Arm, 1895, lithograph, 22 15/16 x 16 15/16 inches