Among his many publications, are *Making Modernism: Picasso and the Creation of a Market for Twentieth-Century Art* (1995) and *Picasso: The Artist’s Studio* (2001). His exhibitions include *Picasso and American Art* (Whitney Museum of American Art, 2006), *Post-Picasso: Contemporary Responses* (Museu Picasso Barcelona, 2014), and *Face to Face: Picasso and Old Masters* (Museo de Bellas Artes, Seville, and Museo Picasso Málaga, 2021-22).  He received his undergraduate degree from Stanford University and his PhD and MBA from Columbia University. He is Kluger Family Professor of Art History at Trinity College (Hartford, USA) and Director of Research at the Fundación Almine y Bernard Ruiz-Picasso. 

Foto: Ciro Frank Schiappa 

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Curatorship: Michael FitzGerald

This book presents an innovative new reading of Picasso’s long artistic career. Instead of dividing his art into discrete stylistic periods, authoritative texts and lavish illustrations demonstrate the unity of his work by showing Picasso’s art as a dynamic whole united by his exploration of both his past art and invention of new artistic conceptions.  

Selected from the collection of the Museo Picasso Málaga and the Fundación Almine y Bernard Ruiz-Picasso (FABA), more than 150 paintings, sculptures, drawings and engravings explore the creative pathways of his art. Extensive photographs of the installation demonstrate the unity of his art through unexpected juxtapositions of works from different decades. More than 30 texts explore the meaning of major individual works. Five ‘focus’ chapters address specialized facets of his practice, including his responses to African sculpture, World War II and the commission to create a huge mural for UNESCO headquarters in Paris. 

 

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Publisher

Illustrations

Binding

Pablo Picasso: Structures of Invention. The Unity of a Life’s Work

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Barcelona, c. 1896 

Lola with a Doll (The Artist’s Sister) 

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Paris, 1906

Head of a Woman (Fernande) 

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Paris, April 19, 1921 

Sheet Music and Guitar 

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Dinard, summer 1922 

Man Looking at a Sleeping Woman

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Paris, autumn 1923 

Maternity

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Paris, spring 1923 

The Three Graces 

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Head of a Warrior   Boisgeloup, 1933 

Head of a Warrior 

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Paris, February 21, 1947 

Rooster and Knife on a Table

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Cannes, March, 27 and April 7, 1957 

Plat Espagnol Decorated with a Head of a Bull 

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In collaboration with

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The sense of terror in the face of approaching war is palpable during this period. Nonetheless, works such as the present one reveal the strength of Picasso’s resistance as he continued to express his profound appreciation of life in the multifaceted repertoire of his representations: sketchbooks, preparatory studies, drawings, prints and paintings.

‘The next day he said, “You’d be better posing for me nude.” When I had taken off my clothes, he had me stand back to the entrance, very erect, with my arms at my side. Except for the shaft of daylight coming in through the high windows at my right, the whole place was bathed in a dim, uniform light that was on the edge of shadow. Pablo stood off, three or four yards from me, looking tense and remote. His eyes didn’t leave me for a second. He didn’t touch his drawing pad; he wasn’t even holding a pencil. It seemed a very long time. Finally he said, “I see what I need to do. You can dress now. You won’t have to pose again.”’





MPM2.136_PICASSO_Mujer en un sillón (Françoise Gilot)

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This highly stylised portrait of Françoise Gilot (born 1921) differs greatly from the abstract treatments of Picasso’s models from other periods. Although right and isosceles triangles and circles are among the painting’s primary elements, the overall rendition is not abstract. The triangles overlap with such a careful fit that the angles are rarely broken. The impression of continuity thus achieved creates a natural harmonious effect. The figure’s beauty manifests in the clarity of these defined shapes.

Françoise wrote that, when she told Picasso that Henri Matisse also wished to paint her portrait, he replied, ‘Matisse isn’t the only one who can paint you with green hair.’ From then on, ‘the hair developed into a leaf form and once he had done that, the portrait resolved itself in a symbolic floral pattern. He worked in the breasts with the same curving rhythm.’

As unpretentious as Nature itself, Françoise appears as a flower’s corolla with leaflike tresses. Simple, yet regal, she sits proud as a lioness and as dignified as an ancient Egyptian statue. The straight lines of the bulky, awkward triangular arms seem carved into the canvas. Her triangular hands suggest the massive stone paws of a sphinx. The treatment recalls the hands in a series of portraits of Dora Maar from October and November of 1941.

The complementary colours – the blue violet of the background and the yellow orange of the figure – strengthen one another, and their juxtaposition accentuates the harsh definition already imposed by the geometric composition of the woman’s body. Unlike the thick paint on her cheeks and forehead and the back of the chair that frames her head, these light brushstrokes leave areas of the canvas exposed. 

Although she can be identified earlier, in works made during the German occupation, her presence is not fully established in Picasso’s oeuvre until April 1946 and is generally associated with his Vallauris period from 1947 and 1954. 

Text: Robert McDonald Parker, ‘Woman in an Armchair (Françoise Gillot)’, in *Collection Museo Picasso Málaga*, Madrid, Tf Editores; Málaga, Museo Picasso Málaga, 2003, p. 127.

Woman in an Armchair (Françoise Gilot) 

Eduard Vallès, curator of modern and contemporary art at the National Art Museum of Catalonia. Vídeo in Spanish

Eduard Vallès talks about "Woman in an Armchair (Françoise Gilot)", 1946

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During the war years, Picasso painted a series of horizontal nudes as grim and motionless as corpses. His postwar reclining nudes came back to life, unfolding like the fields and hills of a landscape, while his vertical sheet metal sculptures invite the viewer’s eyes to caress their surfaces and crevices. 

‘“Art is never chaste”, Picasso said to me one day. “Ignorant, innocent people should not be allowed to look at it; those who are insufficiently prepared should not encounter it. Yes, art is dangerous. Or, if it is chaste, it is not art.”’ 

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With a folded, dangling arm and cutout features, this representation of Jacqueline Roque (1927–1986), the artist’s second and last wife, is known in three other versions. One example, made of paper, enabled Picasso to decide how and where to bend or ‘crease’ the metal and allowed him to experiment with the size and the placement of the open-work areas. 

The figure of Jacqueline occupies two ‘sections’ of a metal sheet that has been folded into three panels. One panel is solid and has not been worked, serving as a structural support and augmenting the perceived depth of the body. The model’s features have been sliced out of the metal: eyebrows, eyes, ears, mouth and cheeks, a breast and an arm. With the exception of the right arm, hanging from the figure’s centreline, these forms are expressed by hollowed, absent spaces. Viewed from various angles, the sculpture’s flat-metal sections assume volume. Occupying and appropriating these empty spaces into itself, the body acquires depth and mass. 

Metal cutout sculptures of this type were part of Picasso’s production in the 1960s. The first example was a large bird of prey […]. In general, these metalworks recalled the paper cutouts Picasso had made in the early 1940s during the Second World War and the primitive silhouettes, especially those of paper animals and figures that he had made as a child. According to Lionel Prejger, Picasso invented this type of sculpture as a means of giving ‘permanent shape’ to the paper cutouts he had accumulated over time and, nonetheless, became so inspired by the process that he began to ‘cut out new paper shapes every day, in such quantity that it was hard to keep up with him’ (Prejger cited in McCully 1997, p. 259). […] It has also been suggested that the artist’s work in metal developed simultaneously from the metal toys he created for his own children. 

Picasso’s collaboration in the 1960s with the Norwegian sculptor Carl Nesjar (who had discovered a special cement that could cover large flat surfaces) resulted in a number of important public commissions of colossal cement sculpture, some based on this type of construction of cutout and folded forms. 

This cutout sculpture of Jacqueline was made in Cannes in 1961, the year she and Picasso married. 

Text: After McDonald Parker, ‘Woman’, in *Collection Museo Picasso Málaga*, Madrid, Tf Editores; Málaga, Museo Picasso Málaga, 2003, pp. 359–60.


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Woman

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Unlike the painters known as ‘Orientalists’ who sought out supposedly exotic settings, Picasso, who had been born in the south of Europe, turned light into a major protagonist in his work. When the artist decided to locate his studio and home in a property set among pine trees and bathed by the light of the Côte d’Azur, his paintings and ceramics turned more joyful and his symbolic fields became populated with fauns, nymphs and satyrs who appear to be listening with a smile to the old tales told by the sailors of ancient times on their return from voyages around the classical isles.

‘“For me the role of painting”, says Picasso, “is not to depict movement, to show reality in movement. Its role, for me, is rather to halt movement. You must go further than movement in order to halt an image. Otherwise you’re chasing after it. For me, only at that moment is there reality.”’

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Picasso and his future wife Jacqueline Roque Hutin met in 1952 at the Madoura factory, where she was working in the shop, and his earliest portraits of her date from 1954. In order to escape the small-town atmosphere of Vallauris, they moved in the autumn of that year to his rue des Grands Augustins studio in Paris. In the first two weeks of October he began a series of colourful portraits of his new muse, including Jacqueline Seated.

The placement of the seated Jacqueline in front of three bands of colour – red for the ground or floor, yellow for the space behind her, and blue for the sky above – suggests that she is out of doors in the sunny Mediterranean, although the work was painted in Paris. At the same time, Picasso was surely thinking about his dying friend Matisse, who typically set the women in his paintings against broad areas of flat colour.

Whenever Picasso came up with an image for a new woman in his life, he picked out those features which, for him, conveyed both her physical characteristics and also her temperament. Here, he began with the head, which visible underpainting reveals that he first placed in the centre, facing in the opposite direction. The cool, serene face of the final version, which reflects Jacqueline’s supportive role in their relationship, combines both profile and frontal views, emphasising her large dark eyes and straight nose. Her abundant hair appears to be tied back behind her head, while the blue curve at the right could also stand for her hair gathered in a bun. In this work, in contrast to late, explicit paintings of her naked, Jacqueline’s compact body is rendered as an almost flat rectangular form, with the diamond pattern of her dress following the single curve of her knees.

Text: Marilyn McCully, ‘Jacqueline Seated’, in *Museo Picasso Málaga Collection*, Málaga, Museo Picasso Málaga, 2010, p. 44.

Jacqueline Seated

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The chivalrous knights and children in Picasso’s late paintings seem to have stepped out of the pages of ancient romances and fairy tales. The artist worked with unprecedented freedom, simulating the decorative patterns of textiles and the artlessness of children’s drawings. But the complex interweaving of forms reveals the experience of eight decades of making art.

‘When visiting an exhibition of children’s drawings, some years later, he remarked: “When I was their age I could draw like Raphael, but it took me a lifetime to learn to draw like them.”

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*Musketeer with Sword* was included in the last exhibition authorised by Picasso, held at the Palais des Papes in Avignon. As its curator, the artist selected the 200 works displayed, which he limited to his production between 1970 and 1972. Picasso died in April 1973 and the exhibition opened the following month, revealing an artist moving in a space of freedom – compositional, chromatic and thematic – possibly unparalleled at any other moment in his career. It was this very freedom in his final output which disconcerted some of Picasso’s critics. 

*Musketeer with Sword* dates from 28 January 1972, a month in which the artist painted various *musketeers* brandishing swords, using different pictorial calligraphies. All these musketeers seem to have a certain biographical element that connects them, expressed through the eyes, a physical feature which Picasso generally emphasised, even in his most Baroque works such as this one. Here they are the unmistakable *punctum*, painted with the largest amount of black in the composition, the rest of which is expressed through a combination of brightly coloured long and short brushstrokes and dots. Picasso’s figures of this type have habitually been associated with Rembrandt – a reference point for the artist in his final years – whom Picasso admired for his astonishingly unflinching gaze on death. According to Jacqueline, Picasso ‘started to study Rembrandt during his illness’, but the issue is not in fact so simple, as some resonances fuse with others given that the influences on Picasso’s work are always multi-directional. In reality this portrait combines different iconographies, from the Spanish Golden Age to 19th-century bullfighters who overlap with the musketeers, so that paint brushes are replaced with daggers or swords, as in this canvas. 

A plausible interpretative key to works such as this one lies in Picasso’s own texts, in which he hyperbolically evokes images of that swaggering 17th-century Spain of minor nobles and courtesans, a literary and sometimes surrealist equivalent of the figures in his aquatints for *La Celestina*. Rafael Alberti perceptively observed that the oils shown in Avignon ‘are figures from the Museo del Prado, from the ghostly Toledo of his early youth.’ It is not by chance that in his role as curator, Picasso essentially chose portraits – portraits of those extravagant figures wearing cavaliers’ hats and doublets with swords and pipes who had inhabited his personal cosmos since his youth. They would become the protagonists of his final grotesque parade in the papal palace in which literature, the history of art and autobiography came together in equal measure. 

Text: Eduard Vallès, ‘Musketeer with Sword’, in *Pablo Picasso: New Collection 2017–2020*, Málaga, Fundación Museo Picasso Málaga. Legado Paul, Christine y Bernard Ruiz-Picasso, 2017, pp. 426–27.


Musketeer with Sword 

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In the south of France, Picasso becomes fascinated with the local pottery tradition. Like the artists of the contemporary School of Altamira, he looked back to the prehistoric cave painters who used earth, bone and fire to create art. Other paintings recorded the houses and landscapes that cradled his late work. 

‘Ceramics works like printmaking. The firing is the printing. At that precise moment you realise what you have done. When you receive the proof print, you are no longer the same person who etched the plate. You have changed. You have to go back to the printing plate. But with ceramics, there is no going back.’

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Picasso began his activity in the age-old medium of ceramics at the Madoura factory in Vallauris, the ancient pottery centre where he and Françoise Gilot acquired a villa in 1949. He was attracted to the place, with its old buildings and traditional wood-fired kilns, and to the opportunities and facilities that the owners, Suzanne and Georges Ramié, offered him at their factory. Working alongside the craftsmen, he undertook a variety of ceramic experiments, utilising the plates and jugs that were in regular production, as well as realising some of his own designs with the master thrower Jules Agard. Beginning in 1950 he also collaborated closely with Suzanne Ramié on the shapes that she designed. She was particularly interested in researching ancient or traditional pots, which she then recreated, often on a larger scale than the original sources, for modern decoration. The pot-bellied vessel with six handles (three on either side) and a lid, which is the inspiration for Insect, is known in Provence as a gus, and its purpose was for storing vinegar or water. A rope would be looped through the handles, so that the vessel could be hung on the wall. 

Picasso had a knack for seeing the potential for transformation in ceramic shapes, and, in the case of this *Insect*, he had the idea of turning the whole vessel into a creature by painting the lid as a head with eyes, the handles as arms with little hands extending onto the main body of the pot, while legs are painted at the bottom. Similar features are depicted on either side of the pot, so that the creature actually has eight legs in all. Picasso chose straightforward techniques of decoration, including painting blue slip directly on the white earthenware pot and incising some of the decorative motifs through the blue to reveal the white beneath. 

Text: Marilyn McCully, ‘Insect’, in *Museo Picasso Málaga Collection*, Málaga, Museo Picasso Málaga, 2010, p. 42.

Insect

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The terror of impending war is evident in Picasso’s nudes of the late 1930s. Remaining in occupied Paris, the artist continued to work, but a grey veil of despair descended over his paintings. His small sculptures of heads resemble tiny skulls and carved pebbles; despite their size, they powerfully convey the anguish of the times.

‘I have not painted the war because I am not the kind of painter who goes out like a photographer for something to depict. But I have no doubt that the war is in these paintings I have done.’ 

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The imminent outbreak of the Second World War led Picasso to leave Paris and move to Royan. Together with his partner Dora Maar, Jaume Sabartés and Sabartés’s wife, the artist settled in this small town on the French Atlantic coast in early September 1939, shortly before the start of the conflict, and remained there until August 1940, occasionally making trips to Paris. Also living in Royan in a clandestine manner were Marie-Thérèse Walter and their daughter Maya, whom Picasso had decided to remove from Paris too.  

The turbulent international situation was thus further complicated by the artist’s own tangled personal one, sharing space with his new lover, his ex-lover and his daughter. This portrait based on Dora Maar was executed just two months after their arrival in Royan and responds to a lengthy process that is evident in the four preparatory studies which Picasso executed in a sketchbook between 3 and 9 November. The work’s vertical structure, with the face looking upwards so that the nose is located at the top, had already appeared in earlier works but without achieving the synthesis of this oil, which surpasses even the dynamic line of the prescripts and postscripts of this work.  

Absent here are the elements that define Dora, such as her eyebrows and nails, and Picasso only retains the short, greased-back hair and above all the striking and anarchic movement of her arms. In this case, rather than suggesting repose, the arms crossed behind the head evoke the constantly high-strung state in which Dora found herself according to various accounts. One of those who described her was Brassaï, who said that Dora was ‘prone to outbursts and temper tantrums.’ Rather than ignore this aspect of her character, Picasso took it to its extreme in the portraits he made of her between 1939 and 1940. Despite living in a time of war the artist rarely depicted explicit violence and rather expressed it through the distortions of his model’s face.  

The deformed portraits that he made in Royan through the use of a deliberated randomness are not exclusively based on Dora. They also include his secretary Sabartés and the mother of Marie-Thérèse, who likewise moved to Royan at this period. None of those works, however, transmits the degree of violence and turbulence present in the portraits of Dora, which undoubtedly constitute one of the high points of Picasso’s career.   

Text: Eduard Vallès, ‘Bust of a Woman with Arms Crossed behind Her Head’, in *Pablo Picasso: New Collection 2017–2020*, Málaga, Fundación Museo Picasso Málaga, Legado Paul, Christine y Bernard Ruiz-Picasso, 2017, pp. 264–65. 

Bust of a Woman with Arms Crossed behind Her Head

From 1891 to 1895 the Ruiz Picasso family lived in A Coruña, where Picasso’s father José Ruiz Blasco secured a teaching post at the Da Guarda art school and where Picasso began his artistic training in 1892. 

‘In A Coruña I spent the last years of my childhood and the first years of my youth. I haven’t been back there, but you are aware of the affection I still feel for that land, of which I have beautiful memories. Look, look — here I have postcards of A Coruña: Os Cantóns, El Relleno, San Carlos Garden, the Tower of Hercules, the Da Guarda secondary school where I took my baccalaureate’*.  

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‘Early stoic portraits like this one of an unidentified bearded man place the young Picasso in the tradition of such seventeenth-century Spanish masters as Velázquez, Murillo, and Ribera. At the same time, the sitter’s solemn demeanor announces Picasso’s move into the sober portrayal of social outcasts that will become a major endeavour of his Blue period (1901-1904). 

Although it has been suggested that this undated painting was executed in Barcelona from 1895 to 1897, the work shares many characteristics of the small number (less than two dozen) of Corunna portraits recognized and dated by Josep Palau I Fabre to the winter of 1894 or early spring of 1895. Like them, this portrait derives its power from its rustic nature and raw emphasis on the human condition. It is devoid of any type of setting and lacks the social context and accoutrements favoured in late nineteenth-century European painting and sometimes found in other portraits by Picasso of family and friends. Here, the painter concentrates on the sitter’s face and the downward tilt of the model’s head. For four years, Picasso lived with his family in Corunna. The present work was most likely executed there in 1895 before he entered the fine arts school, La Llotja, in Barcelona in the autumn of that year. 

Neither pretentious nor complicated, the portrait recalls two paintings from Corunna in the Museu Picasso in Barcelona (MPB 110.114, 110.058) and two in the Musée Picasso in Paris (MP 1, 2), which in their pathos equally seems to echo Ribera’s intense baroque realism. For more than three-quarters of a century, the artist or his family kept all these works, as well as a series of slightly larger painting, also from 1895, depicting an older bearded man. 

[…] This portrait was thickly painted on a fine, tight-woven canvas. Patches of exposed canvas, visible at regular intervals on either side of the model, suggest that the work was removed from its original stretcher and remounted. In the lower right corner, traces of writing are visible’. 
 
 
 
Text: GIMÉNEZ, Carmen (ed). *Collection Museo Picasso Málaga*. Malaga: Museo Picasso Málaga, 2003, pp. 66 and 68.

Portrait of a Bearded Man

At the end of the First World War, while Europe was recovering from the destruction it had caused, many artists started a movement characterised by a return to classical ideals as a reaction to the aesthetic and theoretic upheaval of the early twentieth-century avant-garde. 

‘In 1918 Picasso alternated bowls of fruit in a realist syle with other, Cubist one: works that appear to have been painted years apart but were in fact executed within weeks or days of each other. Some of these bowls of fruit can be said to respond to a strictly figurative tradition, thus provoking among critics and admirers of the artist the same evident surprise shich had first manifested itself in 1916’.  

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‘This fruit bowl is positioned on a neutral background as if dropped into a beige laboratory beaker for examination and study. The fruits and bowl are clearly identifiable by comparison with many similar works depicting the same subjet (e.g., [*Man with Fruit Bowl*, 1917](https://museupicassobcn.cat/en/collection/artwork/man-fruit-bowl) y [*Fruit Bowl*, Barcelona, 1917](https://museupicassobcn.cat/en/collection/artwork/fruit-bowl)). […]. Picasso, who undoubtedly borrowed the still-life motif from Paul Cézanne, greatly exploited it later during his Analytical and Synthetic Cubism phases as an ideal subjet for creating and reconstructing space. 

 

This fruit bowl may be related to the still lifes executed in different mediums, including sculpture, for the Saint-Raphaël open-window series in 1919. Most often, the footed bowl is shown on a table beside a musical instrument or a sheet of music. The subject of grapes and a compote seems to have been a frequent motif among the cubists. […]. 

Here, the execution of Picasso’s still-life painting reflects the same lack of depth apparent in earlier Cubist Works, as well as the tendency to compress shadows into planes of flattened colors. However, the light-and-dark contrast that outlines the fruit bowl also silhouettes its shape in the same way that areas of minimally prepared or unpainted canvas are used to create illusions of space and depth. These are techniques of postwar Cubism that Picasso will continue to explore in his color lithographs. Despite overpainting, pentimenti of a design of parallelograms reminiscent of one of Juan Gris’s motifs, as well as Picasso’s own Harlequins, remain behind the fruit bowl. […]. 

El contenido del frutero, y concretamente la manera en que el pintor ha puesto en relieve dos racimos de uvas planos —uno negro silueteado en blanco y otro incoloro de uvas blancas silueteadas con bandas en negro y azul—, reproducen los procedimientos de *collage* y construcción que Picasso había utilizado entre 1912 y 1914. Éste es uno de los muchos ejemplos de su inspiración en obras anteriores para crear en otro medio distinto. Durante toda su carrera, Picasso mezclará materiales con diferentes métodos de producción para renovar constantemente su arte e inventar un lenguaje visual inédito y moderno, destinado a dejar una impronta indeleble en el arte del siglo XX». 

The contents of the fruit bowl, especially the manner in which Picasso has set into relief two flat bunches of grapes—one, a black bunch outlined in white, and another, an uncoloured bunch of white grapes outlined in bands of black and blue—mimic the artist’s collage and construction methods from 1912 to 1914. This is one of many examples of Picasso’s use of his own earlier works as inspiration for his art in other mediums. For the duration of his career, Picasso will mix materials with various methods of production to achieve constant renewal of his own artistry and to invent a fresh, modern visual language destined to become an indelible influence on twentieth-century art’. 
 
 
Text: GIMÉNEZ, Carmen (ed). *Collection Museo Picasso Málaga*. Malaga: Museo Picasso Málaga, 2003, p. 80-82.

Fruit Bowl

This is one of the 225 paintings Pablo Picasso personally selected for his first retrospective, which he himself curated, at the luxurious Galeries Georges Petit in Paris on June 16, 1932. The fact that the works were not arranged chronologically hindered their linear interpretation and their usual classification into ‘periods’. *Portrait of Olga* hung on what was called the ‘family wall’ alongside other iconic pieces by the artist, such as *Self-Portrait* (Paris, 1901) and *Portrait of Olga in an Armchair* (Montrouge, spring 1918). 

*Someone asked me how I was going to hang my exhibition. ‘Badly’, I replied, because an exhibition is like a picture: whether it is well or badly ‘arranged’, it comes to the same thing. What counts is the sense of continuity in ideas.* 

Picasso, quoted from Tériade’s interview with him for the newspaper *L'Intransigeant*, Wednesday June 15, 1932.  

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‘It was through Diaghilev that Picasso met his first wife, the Ukrainian ballerina Olga Khokhlova, when he was working on the designs for *Parade* in Rome in the spring of 1917. Like all the dancers, she was used to posing before a camera and a smitten Picasso photographed her repeatedly in Rome, in Paris where *Parade* was premièred in May, and in Madrid and Barcelona where the Ballets Russes had engagements that summer. He also drew her repeatedly, sometimes naturalistically, sometimes in an abstracted style derived from synthetic Cubism. Drawing her was a way of getting to know her and, by experimenting with different approaches, discovering the right image for her in his painting’. [1] 

‘There is therefore much more in these Works tan Picasso’s supposed return to a classical inspiration. His overwhelming admiration for Ingres is, of course, well known, as was his desire to emulate the Neoclassical master. But this ‘Neoclassical’ label is somewhat simplistic, effectively overlooking the highly significant human aspect that fuelled this fascinating period in the artist’s work. Olga or Paul, or both at once, were the focus of a substantial segment of Picasso’s corpus. We are aware of just how quickly the happiness of the early 1920s soured—starting in 1927, after the death of Lydia and the arrival of Marie-Thérèse Walter in Picasso’s life—and was replaced by a stream of portrayals that seem to illustrate, with an unbelievable strength, the psychoanalytic dialectic between Eros and Thanatos, brought to light by Freud. The final chapters in Pablo and Olga’s shared life seem to be a pure and simple illustration of this inseparable complex between affection and aggression, love and hate. Picasso’s work during the last years the couple lived together reveals a staggering power and violence, combining crucifixion and scenes of bullfighting, in which a horse is eviscerated by the horns of a bull’. [2] 

Texts:  
[1] COWLING, Elizabeth. *Picasso. Portraits*. [Cat. exp.: National Portrait Gallery (London), 2016 and Museu Picasso (Barcelona), 2017]. London: National Portrait Gallery, 2016, pp. 117 and 120.    
[2] PISARRO, Joachim. ‘Picasso never had a Neoclassical period—just an Olga period’. In: PHILIPPOT, Émilia [et al.]. *Olga Picasso*. [Cat. exp.: Musée national Picasso-Paris, 2017; Museo Pushkin (Moscow), 2018 and Museo Picasso Málaga, 2019]. Paris: Gallimard and Musée national Picasso-Paris, 2019, p. 21. 

Portrait of Olga

One of the genres with which Pablo Picasso experimented the most was portraiture. He reinvented this apparently classical field, challenging any trace of academicism or apparent normativity. During these years Marie-Thérèse Walter and Dora Maar, then both part of Picasso’s life in some way, appeared in his works. Dora Maar was recalled in several of Picasso’s writings as the weeping woman. 

‘[…] devilishly seductive in her disguise of tears and smartly hatted by the blows of fate andouille stripper of wrong-doings and perfect knight sweating fear forgetting himself in the clouds […]’.  

Obra_Coleccion_MPM2.138.jpg

‘*Woman with Raised Arms* was executed in 1936, the year that Picasso embarked on his relationship with Dora Maar, a photographer affiliated with the Surrealist group whom he had met at the beginning of that year in Les Deux Magots café in Paris [1]. In fact, this oil is part of a series of works that register the transition from Marie-Thérèse to Dora. Despite the fact that the physiognomic elements correspond to Dora Maar, the graphic language based on rounded forms continues the Marie-Thérèse Walter period, with the use of black outlines, elliptical fields of colour and warm tones, offering a formal and iconographic echo of various earlier portraits of her. That same year Picasso also produced a large number of portraits of Marie-Thérèse in parallel to his relationship with Dora, a case of a juxtaposition of models that is rarely found in such an overt manner in his work. The face, with its large eyebrows and distinctive chin, and the long nails became iconographic signifiers of his new partner, with whom Picasso maintained a relationship until 1943. Although not dated, this painting would have been executed in late autumn of 1936, as various other similar known works (Z. VIII,306). This one is notable among them for its markedly material nature achieved through the application of sand. Picasso constructed stereotypes based on his partners, and the image of Dora Maar would become the “weeping woman” in the series of preparatory studies for *Guernica*. In the artist’s words: “For years I’ve painted her in tortured forms, not with sadism, and not with pleasure either; just obeying a vision that forced itself on me. It was a deep reality, not a superficial one” [2]. Like Julio González’s screaming women, Picasso’s iconography of the woman with her arms raised would give rise to the archetypes of the anguished faces of women from the Spanish Civil War. Aside from the use of Dora Maar as a symbol of suffering and anguish, Picasso rapidly detected her depressive personality, as is evident in this work. The years of their relationship were marked from the outset by problems, to the extent that they only lived together for the first year and by 1937 Dora had already moved to another apartment on rue de Savoie next to Picasso’s studio on Rue des Grands-Augustins [3]. Having remained unpublished for many years, this painting was finally put in print by David Douglas Duncan in 1961 in his book *Picasso’s Picassos*’ [4]. 
 
 
[1] Dora was spending the summer of 1936 in Mougins with Picasso and various members of the Surrealist group, including Man Ray and Paul Éluard, when the Spanish Civil War broke out in July. 
[2] VAN HENSBERGEN, Gijs. *Guernica: The Biography of a Twentieth-Century Icon*. London: Bloomsbury, 2005, p. 146. 
[3] Idid. 
[4] Eduard Vallès In: LEBRERO, José. *Pablo Picasso: New Collection 2017-2020*. [Cat. exp. Museo Picasso Málaga, 2017]. Malaga: Museo Picasso Málaga, 2017, p. 248-249.

Woman with Raised Arms

Obra_Coleccion_MPM1.8.jpg

'In this portrait of Picasso´s son Claude (born 1947), both the painted and unpainted surface of the plywood support contribute to the visual scene. Areas of the work have been left intentionally bare and function as integral elements of the overall composition. This technique-giving the support a role in the conception of the work—is analogous to manipulating the form of a sculpture or molding a ceramic object into shape and may reflect Picasso's experiments, in the three previous years, with clay sculpture and ceramics at the studio of Suzanne and Georges Ramié in Vallauris. 

Many of the Vallauris paintings were executed on plywood. A large number of those created between 1950 and 1953 were also framed much like the present example; they were probably furnished to the artist preframed, for traces of paint often extend beyond the painted plywood onto the frame [1]. 

The coal-brown tones here, similar to the those in Picasso's *Portrait of a Painter after El Greco* from February 1950(Z.XV.165), seem more appropriate to an adult's portrait than that of a child. Such colors, as well as the stark contrast of light and dark in the face, make the setting somber and weigh heavily upon the figure. The round features of the child's head recall the curvilinear style epitomized by [*L'Atelier de la modiste*](https://www.centrepompidou.fr/es/ressources/oeuvre/cGbBj5d), 1926(MNAM, Paris, Z.VII,.2), and comparable works such as the series of head studies for Vollard's edition of Honoré *de Balzac's Le Chef-d'œuvre inconnu* (*Four Studies of Heads. Balzac, Le Chef d´oeuvre inconnu*, Juan-les-Pins, Antibes, August - 22 September 1926). 

In the present painting and similar early portraits of both Claude and Paloma, one sees what has generally been recognized as Picasso's return to Spanish baroque characteristics: Claude's presence, or perhaps his innocence, commands our attention much like the seemingly shy Infanta Margarita of Velázquez's [*Las Meninas*](https://www.museodelprado.es/coleccion/obra-de-arte/las-meninas/9fdc7800-9ade-48b0-ab8b-edee94ea877f) (Museo Nacional del Prado, Madrid). Picasso's portrait of his son may be seen as an image of succession in his family in the same way that the Infanta, portrayed by Velázquez, would have been heiress to the Spanish crown. 

Claude was born in May of 1947 and would have been almost three years old when this portrait is thought to have been painted in Vallauris in early 1950. The chair on the viewer's right is also depicted in a painting of the artist's children Claude and Paloma (Z.XV.157), dated 20 February 1950 [2]. More important, Claude's face is represented almost identically. Other paintings of the two children from January and February 1950 show them playing in colorful environments with writing and drawing instruments, tricycles, and various dolls and other toys. Incorrectly listed in the estate inventory as "*Fillette en brun et blanc*" (*Young girl in brown and white*), the sitter of the Museum's portrait was identified as Claude by later comparison with contemporaneous portraits of the two children, such as the example (Z.XV.157) noted above from the artist's estate’ [3]. 
 
 
[1 and 2] GIMÉNEZ, Carmen. 1994. Picasso. *Primera mirada*. Cat. exp. (Malaga: Palacio Episcopal, 1994- 1995; Sevilla: Pabellon Mudejar, 1995; Nimes: Carré d'Art, Musée d'Art Contemporain, 1995). Sevilla: Centro Andaluz de Arte Contemporaneo, PP. 318-319. 
[3] GIMÉNEZ, Carmen (ed). *Collection Museo Picasso Málaga*. Malaga: Museo Picasso Málaga, 2003, pp. 140-142.

Claude in Brown and White

Between 1945 and 1947 Pablo Picasso modelled more than twenty figurines of standing women. Besides the usual interpretation that relates these works to Greek Tanagra figures and other pieces from ancient Eastern cultures, other studies link them to Iberian votive statuettes. Picasso specifically collected ninety five of these religious figurines representing men, women and animals. There is some agreement that Picasso’s ‘discovery’ of Iberian culture can be dated to 1906, after the artist visited the Iberian Cabinet in the Musée du Louvre. 

‘Picasso preferred to frequent the rooms on the ground floor, wandering here and there like a hunting dog looking for game among the Egyptian and Phoenician antiquities, among the sphinxes, the basalt idols, the papyrus and the brightly painted sarcophagi’. 

Ardengo Soffici. «Fatti personali». *Gazzetta del Popolo*, 19 February 1939, p. 3. 

Obra_Coleccion_MPM2.141-1.jpg

‘In 1946, Picasso and Françoise Gilot visited the Madoura pottery at Vallauris, and so began Picasso’s intense affair with ceramics. He drew inspiration from the ancient Greek and Asian pottery exhibited at the Louvre […]’. [1] 

‘This 1947 earthenware statue of standing woman with flowing hair and exaggerated breasts repeats features of a pencil sketch that Picasso executed in 1946 in Antibes. Despite her voluptuous form, the statue’s overall pose is stiff, defined by her legs and arms that press tightly against her body. In both drawing and sculture, the standing woman, with her long elegant neck, is slender and immobile. Only the round breasts and mass of falling hair soften her body’s rigid vertical line. 

In earlier draings, such as those from February 1946 (Z.XIV.137-151), Picasso explored the female body in flowerlike constructions: the head and breasts were circles; the body, often comprised of straight or curved lines. The woman-flower, or *femme-fleur*, representations are often associated with his lover Françoise Gilot (born 1921). At this time, the particular use of circles as a simplified form for the female breast is also attributed to Françoise. […] In June 1946, circular breasts distinguish a series of crayon drawings of standing nudes. 

Picasso used the forms of *tanagras*—ancient terracotta figures and vessels—as inspiration for ceramics, like the present example, that were produced at the Madoura factory in Vallauris in October 1947. Some of his interpretations include the spherical breasts similar to those in the present work. This figure of a standing woman belongs to 22 statues recorded by Werner Spies (Spies 303-316, 322-329) […]. According to Marilyn McCully, the earthenware and plaster models were made in 1947. Valsuani cast eleven bronzes of each figure, ten of which are numbered 1/10’. [2] 

Tomado de:    
[1] LEBRERO, José. *Pablo Picasso. New Collection 2017-2020*. Malaga: Museo Picasso Málaga, 2017, p. 301.   
[2] GIMÉNEZ, Carmen. *Collection Museo Picasso Málaga*. Malaga: Museo Picasso Málaga, 2003, p. 341.   

Standing Woman

Obra_Coleccion_MPM1.1.jpg

‘When the second world war broke out, Picasso resumed painting and sculpting representations of the human skull. His output reached its height during the last two years of the German occupation of Paris. The paintings often included a medley of other objects, such as candles, open books, vegetables, fish, and pitchers. The skull motif appeared, as well, in Picasso's lithographs ([*Composition with a Skull*](https://www.museopicassomalaga.org/coleccion/composicion-con-calavera)). He also modeled frighteningly [realistic skulls](https://www.museopicassomalaga.org/coleccion/cabeza-de-muerto) and had them cast in bronze in 1943 in a famous wartime series. 

Both human and animal skulls had been present in Picasso's earlier work, according to Alfred Barr, Jr., but it was during the war that the skull became a "frequent motif in his still-life compositions" [1]. When his friend the artist Julio González died in 1942, Picasso expressed his grief by painting a symbol of death, [*Still Life with a Steer's Skull*](https://sammlung.kunstsammlung.de/en/works/126) (Kunstsammlung Nordrhein-Westfalen, Düsseldorf), identified by Pierre Daix as the skull of a bull [2]. After the war, he explored more fully the theme of *vanitas*—a subject that belongs to a centuries-old tradition and reveals Picasso's particular affinity for Dutch baroque painting. 

While Picasso was working on the present painting in January 1947, his companion, Françoise Gilot, was five months pregnant with their son, Claude. The war was over, and Picasso's third child was soon to be born; yet, the canvas is filled with fore-boding, relieved only in part by its vivid blue and yellow colors. Perhaps the painting signifies the natural confrontation with death that is implied in the arrival of new life. 

In the present painting, Picasso seems to have repeated the earlier composition of [*Still Life with a Bull's Head*](https://museum.menard.co.jp/english/collection/european/picasso_pa_02.html) from a 1938 series depicting a table with candle, palette, open book, and bull or minotaur's head. Both paintings remained with the artist and were listed in the estate inventory. The similarities in the geometric structure and the organization of the paintings are important: a prominent, sharply angled form appears at the center of both works (situated, in the earlier painting, to the immediate left of the bull's head); the line of the table is repeated as the striped support for the skull and three sea urchins; and the vertical band appears at the left edge of both paintings. The pentagonal shape within the geometric block underneath the bull's head corresponds to the container for the sea urchins in the present paint-ing and is in the same location on the canvas. The bull's head and the symbol of the earthly arts in the former painting can be equated with the human skull and the creatures from the sea. 

When Jaime Sabartés questioned him about the significance of the sea urchins, Picasso said, "The eyes collect objects in passing...Purely and simply...in the same manner that I gather what I find in front of me." No more important than any other object, the sea urchins contributed to the element of surprise and fortunate accidents that Picasso insisted upon in his art [3]. Two of the sea urchins are seen from above and one from the side. The middle one shows the five-pointed star normally hidden within its shell. Despite their flat rendering, the thorny sea creatures seem to bob as playfully as Picasso's athletic beachgoers from Dinard. This sense of contained animation contrasts with the solemnity of the static human skull. Dancing before its hollow eyes, the sea urchins may be a reminder of the ephemeral nature of life. Some art historians have suggested a Christian interpretation for the skull and three sea urchins, i.e., that they represent either Christ's Crucifixion and his thorny crown or humanity and the holy Trinity. 

Sea urchins began to appear in Picasso's work in October 1946, following his postwar focus on the vanitas theme; many of these works are in the Musée Picasso in Antibes [4] The present example is one of three paint-ings of skulls and urchins dating from January and February of 1947 (Z.XV.26-27,31). A little more than two years after its execution, this painting was exhibited in Paris at La Maison de la Pensée Française, where it was one of sixty-four works. It has been on public view only once more, in the 1994-1995 exhibition *Picasso. Primera mirada*’ [5]. 
 
 
[1] BARR, Alfred H., Jr. [1946| 1974. *Picasso: Fifty Years of His Art*. 3'd ed. New York: The Museum of Modern Art, p. 238. 
[2] DAIX, Pierre. 1995. *Dictionnaire Picasso*. Paris: Éditions Robert Laffont, p. 623. 
[3] GIMÉNEZ, Carmen. 1994. *Picasso. Primera mirada*. Exh. cat. (Malaga: Palacio Episcopal, 1994-1995; Seville: Pabellon Mudejar, 1995; Nîmes: Carré d'Art, Musée d'Art Contemporain, 1995) Seville: Centro Andaluz de Arte Contemporaneo, p. 317. 
[4] SABARTÉS, Jaime and Paul Éluard. 1948. *Picasso à Antibes*. Paris: Éditions René Drouin, p. 33. 
[5] GIMÉNEZ, Carmen (ed). *Collection Museo Picasso Málaga*. Malaga: Museo Picasso Málaga, 2003, pp. 129-131.

Still Life with Skull and Three Sea Urchins

Obra_Coleccion_MPM1.69.jpg

‘More than 30 years after the creation of his first Cubist works, Picasso returned to explore the elements of space and depth that had intrigued him as a young artist. The *long plate* shown here is one of the Madoura ceramic factory's press-molded models made for mass commercial production; it is composed of white earthenware and has been incised and "paint-ed" by the artist with slips, a mixture of clay and liquids that produced the colors. The three-dimensional plate repeats the effects of Picasso's early Cubist sculptures, except here the variety of materials has been limited to fired clay and colors created with slips. 

The Mediterranean tradition of embellishing everyday ceramics into decorative still lifes dates back centuries. Picasso has combined the *trompe-l'œil* effect of Spanish *platos de engaño* with the elaborate works of the sixteenth-century ceramist Bernard Palissy for the French court to produce these modern ceramic still lifes intended to fool the eye. Historically, this kind of ceramic work intentionally confused the practical, utilitarian nature of ceramic plates and cookware with the unlimited possibilities of a purely decorative object. 

The plate has been coated with slips, whose clay and liquid composition has a natural affinity with the earthenware and has turned, when heated, into the deep brown and black tones that cover the majority of the visible surface. The uncoated areas exposing the white earthenware cleverly unify the dining utensils: glass, cutlery, and plate, visually relating items that serve a common function through their white color. The pronounced contrast of colors created by retaining a portion of the plate's natural tone amplifies the depth of this ceramic still life. Had the plate's lower rim been painted, the play of elements would have been reduced and the sense of depth significantly flattened. A black line that traces the border of the plate skillfully defines and unifies the composition. The Musée Picasso in Paris has an earthenware plate (*[Long Plate with Still Life: Glass, Knife and Apple*](https://cep.museepicassoparis.fr/explorer/plat-rectangulaire-decore-dune-nature-morte-verre-couteau-et-pomme-mp3676), 28 October1947) with a still life of a glass, knife, and apple that reveals compositional and technical parallels with the present example; both are dated 28 October 1947’. 
 
 
Text: GIMÉNEZ, Carmen (ed). *Collection Museo Picasso Málaga*. Malaga: Museo Picasso Málaga, 2003, pp. 365-366.

Still Life with Glass and Knife

Obra_Coleccion_MPM1.72R.jpg

‘The form of his ceramic pitch with its long neck and double handles was a shape commonly produced by hand at the Madoura ceramics factory. The thrown white earthenware pitcher has been incised and painted with slips yielding the visible blue, green, and black tones. Respecting the object's given shape, Picasso used the piece's neck, belly, and foot as the basis for his design. Through the use of painted slips, the extended neck of the pitcher has easily been converted into the woman's two-tiered coiffure. The rounded belly and base of the object also logically transform themselves into the woman's face and neck. The artist has respected the three unit-forms of the ceramic vase, allowing each part of the object to correspond to a different part of the painted woman's physiognomy. Although this unusually shaped, two-handled piece is a standard Madoura shape, it is also an exaggerated version of a zoomorphic pot that Picasso designed in the late 1940s and often used for the depiction of birds or large birdlike faces; the Museum has one such example (*Owl with the Head of a Faun*). The transformation of these unusually shaped ceramics into familiar human or animal shapes elevates their functional morphology into visual poetry’. 
 
 
Text: GIMÉNEZ, Carmen (ed). *Collection Museo Picasso Málaga*. Malaga: Museo Picasso Málaga, 2003, pp. 382-383.

Head of a Woman

Obra_Coleccion_MPM1.13.jpg

`The limbs of the undulating bather in this late work Picasso are barely distinguishable from the foamy green sea surging around her. Swirling brushstrokes immerse her in the waves so that subject and environment are fused in absolute harmony. The woman depicted here is probably Jacqueline Roque (1927-1986), Picasso's last wife. However, the painting's composition recalls a work almost forty years earlier, the *Swimmer* of 1932 in which arabesques suggest the athletic body of his mistress Marie-Thérèse Walter (1909-1977). The two paintings from markedly different periods bear strong similarities in general structure and orien-tation. The works also reveal Picasso's tendency to combine the features of new and old lovers. This is particularly the case with Jacqueline who, in other interpretations, resembles Fernande Olivier (1881-1966), an important model during his Rose period. Both paintings share the sense of movement expressed in the extended arms and open hands of the free-spirited women ([MP 78](https://cep.museepicassoparis.fr/explorer/deux-femmes-courant-sur-la-plage-la-course-mp78), Z.IV.380) made famous in Picasso's curtain for the ballet *Le Train bleu*; and in both paintings, the bathers' lack of volume derives from Picasso's amoebalike acrobats and swimmers of the late 1920s and early 1930s. 

The present work has no apparent indication of depth, no reference point to distinguish foreground or background. Nonetheless, the forms themselves in their size and placement so powerfully convey a sense of mass that the viewer is tricked into seeing depth where there is none. This manipulation of space was at the core of Picasso's early experiments with Cubism and is repeated here in the work of the aging artist, still investigating pictorial space. 

This painting was first exhibited in Avignon at the Palais des Papes in 1973 and was last on public view in the 1994-1995 exhibition *Picasso. Primera mirada*. The work is a pendant to the painting of a male bather (Z.XXXIII.88) made on the same day, 5 July 1971 [1]. Both works appeared in the estate inventory. They treat subjects that Picasso rarely explored in painting after the late I920s and 1930’ [2]. 
 
 
[1] GIMÉNEZ, Carmen. 1994. *Picasso. Primera Mirada*. Cat, exp. (Malaga: Palacio Episcopal, 1994-1995; Sevila: Pabellon Mudejar, 1995; Nimes: Carré d´Art, Musée d´Art Contemporain, 1995). Sevilla: Centro Andaluz de Arte Contemporaneo, p. 322. 
[2] GIMÉNEZ, Carmen (ed). *Collection Museo Picasso Málaga*. Malaga: Museo Picasso Málaga, 2003, pp. 166-167.

Bather

This work is one of the many still lifes Pablo Picasso produced in both painting and sculpture, in this case based on a musical theme. *Sheet Music and Guitar* recalls some of the paintings, *papiers collés* and Cubist assemblages from the years before the First World War, showing that he continued to use this language after the conflict. 

‘[Picasso] Not only did he perpetuate pictorial traditions that the seventeenth- and eighteenth-century masters of Spanish still life, from Sánchez Cotán to Meléndez, had defined; but by wilful choices of objects, words, and even colors, he could disclose, sometimes obviously, sometimes cryptically, his continuing allegiance to his Spanish birthright’.  

‘The simplicity and purity of line in Picasso’s drawings during the final stage of Analiytical Cubism (1909 to 1912) continue to develop in the years of the First World War and throughout his neoclassical period (1918 to 1924). A renewed interest in the work of the nineteenth-century French artist Jean-Auguste-Dominique Ingres, as revealed in Picasso’s realistic portrait studies of 1914 and 1915, further nourished his concentration on draftsmanship. As Alfred Barr, Jr. has noted, even in 1921, the same year this still life was painted, Picasso was producing classic line drawings in the style of Ingres and Raphael (BAAR, Alfred H. Jr. *Picasso: Fifty Years of His Art*. 3rd ed. New York: The Museum of Modern Art, 1946, p. 120). 

A fine example of the artist’s use of composed geometrical forms, the present painting was executed only months before perhaps the greatest Cubist paintings oof the early 1920—Picasso’s two versions of the *Three Musicians* ([MOMA](https://www.moma.org/collection/works/78630), New York, Z.IV.331 y [Philadelphia Museum of Art](https://philamuseum.org/collection/object/53963), Z.IV.332). The characteristics of Synthetic Cubism that distinguish these works are evident also in the painting under discussion. Here, the artist has combined the techniques of line drawing and the use of angular color fields to create form out of flatness. 

The black parallel lines of the sheet music and the stringed musical instrument establish a horizontality that is reinforced by the oval tabletop and its rectilinear base. Despite the multiple color fields, it is the black lines that support and unify the overall composition. They also animate the surface by creating the impression that the underlying color fields are not flat, isolated entities but intermingled parts of a three-dimensional composition. The wide surrounding band of beige adds definition and depth, as well as locking the various elements into place. Traces of red undertones are evident. Also, particularly in the white-painted areas of the canvas, other images are visible, but their exact nature is unclear. The clean separation of the geometrical forms and the simple uncluttered composition convey a sense of purified abstraction, a strange harmony in a synthesized vision of lines, straight edges, and hard angles’. 
 
 
Text: GIMÉNEZ, Carmen (ed). *Collection Museo Picasso Málaga*. Malaga: Museo Picasso Málaga, 2003, p. 83-84.

Much has been written about Picasso’s travels around Italy in 1917. The artist’s contact with the material culture of the civilisation of Ancient Rome has been traced in many works produced between 1917 and 1925.  

‘As is almost always the case with Picasso, his art of the early 1920’s is related in a complex way to both past and present. He was directly inspired by the painting and sculptur of ancient Rome; his style proves his affiliation in the tradition which runs from Masaccio through Raphael and Poussin to Ingres, and at the same time his painting shows an awareness of what was being done in the very same years by a great painter two generations older than himself, and a sculptor a few years his senior’  

‘*Man Watching his Sleeping Female Companion* [*Man Looking at a Sleeping Woman*] is a small work—done in pencil and oil on the lid of a cigar box—probably executed during summer 1922 at Dinard. The stylistic language is characteristic of Picasso’s “neoclassical” period, when, constantly referring to art history, he turned more openly towards the models of antiquity. The picture also reflects Picasso’s interest at this time in nineteenth-century painting, itself imbued with the ideals of antiquity. 

The subtle balance of the composition, the approach to drawing and the idealization of the nudes are evocative of, for example, Ingres—a reference frequently mentioned by contemporary critics to describe Picasso’s new way of painting. In fact, the sensual pose of the sleeping young woman, her head resting on the curve of her raised arm, explicitly echoes the French master’s Bathers and Odalisques, which were themselves inspired by Giorgione’s figures of [*Venus*](https://skd-online-collection.skd.museum/Details/Index/294844). In the same vein, Rosenblum drew the comparison between Picasso’s male figure and that of Augustus in [*Virgil reading the Aeneid to Augustus, Octavia and Livia*](https://fine-arts-museum.be/fr/la-collection/jean-auguste-dominique-ingres-auguste-ecoutant-la-lecture-de-l-eneide) (1819; Brussels, Musées Royaux). Picasso probably saw this painting at the Salon d’Automne of 1905, and again in 1921, at the great Ingres retrospective in Paris. 

The importance of drawing for painting was established by the first Academies, and up to the end of the nineteenth century painters would often draw their subjects naked before “clothing” them with Paint and smoothing out all the visible signs of preparatory work to complete the picture. This is a method Picasso inverted, cleverly setting the abstract power of the line against the smooth flatness of the red ground and the illusionistic contours of his male nude. In other ways, the underlying lines and the partial use of oil recall certain pictures by Jacques-Louis David, which, unlike Picasso’s works, would have been considered unfinished in the academic context of the late eighteenth century. One example is [*Bonaparte*](https://collections.louvre.fr/ark:/53355/cl010066398) (1797-1798; Paris, Musée du Louvre), shown in Paris in 1913, another, the monumental [*Tennis Court Oath*](https://collections.louvre.fr/ark:/53355/cl020114798), in which the pencil lines are incomplete and only a nude, four faces and a few hands have been painted in oil. Research has not so far been able to establish categorically that Picasso saw the work before 1921, but the idea cannot be rejected, considering the interest he later showed in The [*Death of Marat*](https://fine-arts-museum.be/fr/la-collection/jacques-louis-david-marat-assassine) (1793; Brussels, Musées Royaux) and [*The Sabines*](https://collections.louvre.fr/ark:/53355/cl010065426) (1796-1799; Musée du Louvre, París), two of David’s masterpieces that Picasso was to reinterpret in 1931 and 1962-3 respectively ([*Rape of the Sabine women [after David]*](https://www.centrepompidou.fr/es/ressources/oeuvre/cR54pXk), Mougins, 4, 5 and 8 December 1962. Musée national d’art moderne, Centre Georges Pompidou, París). […]’. 
 
 
Text: Cécile Godefroy in GODEFROY, Cécile y Marilyn McCully (dirs.). *Pablo Picasso: 43 Works*. [Cat. Exp.: Museo Picasso Málaga, 2010]. Malaga: Museo Picasso Málaga, 2010, p. 66-71.

Man Looking at a Sleeping Woman 

Following the birth of Paulo, his son with Olga Khokhlova, in February 1921, Picasso’s depictions of motherhood increased exponentially: large and small paintings and drawings in pencil, charcoal and chalk served to explore compositions that have been described as the tenderest and most sentimental of his entire output. They show monumental female figures (large-handed, solid and enthroned), affectionate beach scenes, and nudes such as this *Maternity* executed in autumn 1923.  

‘This peculiar and momentously reactionary alternative to Cubism is a Deep conundrum for historians of modernism’  

‘Olga Khokhlova is an exception in the story of Picasso’s love life. The daughter of Stepan Khokhlov, a colonel in the Imperial Army, and of Lydia Vinchenko, she was his first official wife, and the first woman to give him the experience of fatherhood, with the birth of Paul on February 4, 1921. From the moment they met in 1917, the young woman seemed to crystallize all the ambitions of a mature man who, at that point, was looking for a calm and peaceful love life, after the death of his previous companion, Eva, in 1915. […] 

[…] This decision, which seems to have been contemporaneous with meeting Olga Khokhlova, gave rise to a number of behavioral, social, and moral analyses and interpretations—which have since become clichés— suggesting the undue influence of a bourgeois, conservative spouse. In reality, we know that Picasso had initiated this new direction as early as 1914-1915, two years before he met Olga. Following Pierre Daix, it is important to state just how much his Neoclassicism, his penchant for deformation and unfinished states, was deeply subversive and far removed from any “return to the European order”—but this is not our intent here. We would rather highlight the extent to which Olga’s presence as a spouse and model was revolutionary and decisive to Picasso’s creative process, even in all of his work that came later. It was a powerful confirmation of the visible, deliberate, crafted, and fantasized fusion of the domestic sphere and of artistic creation, of life and art'. 
 
 
Text: PHILIPPOT, Emilia, Joachim Pissarro y Bernard Ruiz-Picasso (dirs.). *Olga Picasso*. [Cat. exp. Museo Picasso Málaga, 2019]. Malaga: Museo Picasso Málaga, 2019, pp. 15 y 71.

Maternity 

‘Aslaughtered rooster lies —neck slit, feet bound—on a table. Opposite are a knife and an empty bowl, ordinary kitchen utensils but also killing tools. Marie-Laure Bernadac in Picasso and Things discusses the artist's "culinary obsessions" and cites his use of metaphors such as "the dance of household objects" (2 February 1937) and "the dangers of knives that get away" (8 November 1937) [1]. Might these ideas help explain the mixed messages of this still life as a mundane kitchen scene, a ritual killing, or perhaps a cruel allegory of the need to kill in order to survive? 

The three objects, occupying the upper half of the canvas, repose as if on an altar like the instruments for a sacrifice. As Bernadac points out, "The rooster, a symbol of Christ, is often shown butchered on a table in Picasso's paintings" [2]. The table legs and open drawer seem simultaneously to advance and recede in a Cubist manner, but they ultimately disintegrate into an agitated mass. The disjointed tabletop nearly floats from its base. 

This still life borrows its subject from earlier works, especially *Girl with a Rooster*, 1938 (The Baltimore Museum of Art, Z.IX.109), in which a young girl holds a bound rooster by its wings. A knife on the floor at her feet predicts the bird's fate. Jean Boggs links the rooster in a related study to "the noble tradition of Picasso's dead birds going back at least to the painting of 1912 [MCARS, Madrid, Z.II*.339]" [3]. The present painting borrows the following elements from Picasso's earlier Cubist works: the table and drawer in a 1918 Cubist still-life series of drawings (Z.III.181-182,184,188), and especially a painting (Z.III. 211) from Biarritz; and the dead fowl, some being plucked, in graphic works from 1918 (Z.XXIX.324-325,331-332) and 1919 such as the still life (*Pigeon*, Paris,1919) in which a dead pigeon hangs over the edge of a table much like the rooster here. It is interesting to note that, almost thirty years later, Picasso again associates certain forms and objects, such as this type of table and dead fowl. While his style changes dramatically, this repetition of subject matter gives Picasso's diverse body of work its continuity and coherence. None, how-ever, displays the present painting's simple, direct composition, which is fundamental to its power as an image of death. On the other hand, all of these works are curiously bloodless either foreshadowing death or recording its aftermath-as opposed to Picasso's savage scenes of the 1930s ([*Crucifixion*](https://cep.museepicassoparis.fr/explorer/la-crucifixion-mp122); [*The Woman with a Stylet; Death of a Female Matador*](https://cep.museepicassoparis.fr/explorer/la-femme-au-stylet-mp136) and [*Death of a Male Matador*](https://cep.museepicassoparis.fr/explorer/corrida-la-mort-du-torero-mp145), Cat Seizing a Bird); and the numerous bullfighting scenes of 1934, often drenched in painted blood. The still life with rooster and similar representations may be subtler manifestations of the silent aggression that so clearly marked the still-life collages made with string and nails in the spring of 1926. 

In the Museum's painting, the cross section of the rooster's nearly severed neck is painted as a diagonally bisected quadrangle that cleverly provides a tubelike reality to what would otherwise be just a flat curve. Had the table edge not been compressed into the pictorial plane, the bird and other objects on the table would also have remained hopelessly flat. In forcing two planes to converge, Picasso has created the illusion of depth and enhanced the realistic sense of dimension essential to the impact of the painting. 

Picasso frequently painted different versions of the same subject and often in pairs. The theme of the dead rooster appears in a nearly identical painting (*Poultry and Knife on a Table*, Paris, 21 February 1947) in which a rooster's bound feet rise to the center of the work, much like the tied limbs of one of the human cadavers in [*The Charnel House*](https://www.moma.org/collection/works/78752), 1944-1945 (MOMA, New York), and those of animals to be slaughtered in works from 1938 (e.g., a rooster in Z.IX.109; and a goat in Z.IX.116). Recent scholarship dates both still lifes with roosters to 21 February 1947 [4]. The two works are so similar that it is difficult to tell which one was painted first or to understand why he treated the subject twice on the same day. Based on its details and degree of styliza-tion, Boggs has suggested that the Museum's work succeeded the other one [5]. Christian Zervos, despite an initial dating error, catalogued the works in the same order. 

The subject of food and the overtones of domesticity implied in these two paintings announce the theme of the abstract masterpieces both entitled *Kitchen*, 1948 ([MOMA](https://www.moma.org/collection/works/79668?classifications=any&date_begin=Pre-1850&date_end=2024&include_uncataloged_works=false&on_view=false&q=Kitchen+Picasso&recent_acquisitions=false&with_images=true), New York, Z.XV.106; Musée Picasso, Paris, Z. XV. 107), glorifying the kitchen from the rue des Grands-Augustins’ [6]. 
 
 
[1-5] BOGGS, Jean Sutherland, Marie-Laure Bernadac y Brigitte Léal. 1992. *Picasso and Things*. Cat. exp. (Cleveland: The Cleveland Museum of Art, 1992; Filadelfia: The Philadelphia Museum of Art, 1992; París:Galeries Nationales du Grand Palais, 1992). Cleveland: The Cleveland Museum of Art, pp. 23, 26, 28, 312. 
[6] GIMÉNEZ, Carmen (ed). *Colección Museo Picasso Málaga*. Malaga: Museo Picasso Málaga, 2003, pp. 135-137.

Rooster and Knife on a Table 

‘Constructed of lines and closed geometric shapes, this seated woman looks more like a monument than a person. She is the schematic version of a costumed figure for the 1917 ballet *Parade* in which human features are commingled with urban architecture. Her abstract painted form-over-sized circled breasts, elongated body, and miniature head—resembles the gigantic ironwork of sculptors such as Alberto Giacometti and Alexander Calder. Defying traditional representations of space and perspective, Picasso's linear and geometric forms redefine the two-dimensionality of the painted scene. In making space ambiguous, they give the impression of a three-dimensional object so open that one can look into it. 

A study, dated 11 June 1946 and related to this painting, appears beside an elaborate portrait of Françoise Gilot (born 1921) on a drawing sheet in the collection of the Musée Picasso in Paris ([*Woman in an Armchair [Françoise Gilot]*], on deposit in Antibes, Musée Picasso). The abstract drawing so faithfully corresponds to the present painting that one would expect the drawing to be a preparatory study. The reverse of the painting is, however, dated three days earlier-confirmation of Picasso's habit of making drawings after completed paintings, presumably as a form of personal documentation. 

Françoise Gilot met Picasso in May 1943. A few years later, she came to symbolize the femme-fleur, or woman-flower, in his work (*Woman in an Armchair [Françoise Gilot]*). Françoise dominated the early years in Vallauris, just as the shapely Marie-Thérèse Walter had done in the Boisgeloup period. Several of the female portraits from 1946 that were in the inventory of Picasso's estate are based on Françoise and depict perfect-circle breasts and a slender tapered body. This painting and one other (Succession no. 13078) are wirelike; two are similarly sculptural but massive (Succession no. 13098 and *Woman in an Armchair [Françoise Gilot]*). The tiny head and balloonlike breasts also appear in two series of pencil and colored-pencil drawings from the artist's estate. 

The series from 22 June 1946 (Succession nos. 4827-4831) shows studies for the four-cornered head; the other, from 25-28 June 1946 (Succession nos. 4836, 4845-4854) of which the majority are in the Musée Picasso in Paris, shows sticklike women with full, round breasts. These sketches, thought to have been made after the present painting and matched drawing, give evidence of Picasso's continued fascination with the reworking of these elements’. 
 
 
Text: GIMÉNEZ, Carmen (ed). *Collection Museo Picasso Málaga*. Malaga: Museo Picasso Málaga, 2003, pp.124-126.

Figure 

Unity of a Life’s Work 

Pablo Picasso: Structures of Invention 

Marilyn McCully and Michael Raeburn, formerly art history professor at Princeton University and publisher respectively, have since 1981 been working together on a variety of projects, including many exhibitions of the work of Picasso, among them *Picasso in Istanbul* (Sakip Sabanci Museum, Istanbul, 2005);  *Picasso: Cerámica y tradición* (EXPO 2005 Aichi, and Museo Picasso Málaga, 2005); *Devorar París: Picasso 1900-1907* (Van Gogh Museum, Amsterdam, and Museu Picasso, Barcelona, 2011); *Picasso Côte d'Azur* (Grimaldi Forum, Monte Carlo, 2013); *Picasso in Holland* (Stedelijk Museum, Alkmaar, 2016); *Les Vacances de M. Picasso* (Musée Picasso, Antibes, 2018); *Picasso Tableaux Magiques* (Musée national Picasso-Paris, 2019-20). 

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Curatorship: Marilyn McCully and Michael Raeburn

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Musée national Picasso-Paris © GrandPalaisRmn (musée national Picasso-Paris) / Franck Raux © Succession Pablo Picasso, VEGAP, Madrid, 2025 © Dora Maar, VEGAP, Málaga, 2025

Picasso at Les Voiliers, Royan, summer 1940. Photo: Dora Maar

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Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofía, Madrid. AD01716 © Photographic Archive Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofía © Succession Pablo Picasso, VEGAP, Madrid, 2024

Three Sheeps’ Heads, Royan, 17 October 1939

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Museo Picasso Málaga. Gift of Christine Ruiz-Picasso. Photo: Rafael Lobato © Museo Picasso Málaga © © Succession Pablo Picasso, VEGAP, Madrid, 2024

Sketchbook 202, Royan, 3-9 November 1939

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Museo Picasso Málaga. Gift of Christine Ruiz-Picasso. MPM1.6 Photo: Rafael Lobato © Museo Picasso Málaga © Succession Pablo Picasso, VEGAP, Madrid, 2025 

Bust of a Woman with Arms Crossed behind her Head, Royan, 7 November 1939 

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The Museum of Modern Art, New York. Legado de Louise Reinhardt © Archivo digital, The Museum of Modern Art, Nueva York/Scala, Florencia © Succession Pablo Picasso, VEGAP, Madrid, 2024

Woman Dressing Her Hair, Royan, June 1939

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Musée national Picasso-Paris. Dation Pablo Picasso, 1979. MP187 © GrandPalaisRmn (musée national Picasso-Paris) / Mathieu Rabeau  © Succession Pablo Picasso, VEGAP, Madrid, 2025 

Café at Royan, Royan, 15 August 1940 

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