Provenance
Louis Fort, Paris. Alexandre and Odile Loewy; Sotheby's, Paris, 24 March 2010, lot 4. The authenticity of this work has been confirmed by Claude Picasso. The authenticity of this work has been confirmed by Maya Widmaier Picasso. The present work, painted in 1932 on the day of Picasso's fifty-first birthday, is dedicated to Louis Fort, a master printer and close friend. Picasso first met Fort through Ambroise Vollard, probably when the latter commissioned him to print the 1914 edition of Picasso's landmark Saltimbanques suite. The three continued to collaborate on projects until the Chef d'oeuvre inconnu series in 1931, shortly before Fort retired. Picasso continued their friendship and often stayed in Fort's house in the South of France. He purchased his printing press and remarked to a friend with great reverence: 'It's beautiful isn't it? ...Almost a museum piece...It used to belong to Louis Fort, the printer...I loved this press, so I bought it.' (D. Wye, A Picasso Portfolio: Prints from the Museum of Modern Art, exhib. cat., New York, Museum of Modern Art, 2010, p. 14). This watercolor was subsequently in the collection of Alexandre and Odile Loewy. Loewy was a well known and highly respected bookdealer of Hungarian descent who opened a shop in Paris in the late 1920s and quickly established a reputation for specializing in illustrated books. He would have undoubtedly moved in the same circles as Fort who at the time was the printer of choice for a range of artist's books and portfolios. The Loewys were passionate and discerning collectors, primarily of works on paper and sculpture, focusing on contemporary artists many of whom they would have known personally. The subject of the present watercolor is immediately recognizable as Marie-Thérèse Walter,
Picasso's young model and lover, who he met in January 1927. She was seventeen and he was forty-five. Picasso was mesmerized by her statuesque figure, her fair beauty and her 'Greek' profile, in distinct contrast to the fashionable flapper silhouette and particularly to Picasso's own wife Olga Khokhlova who was a slim, dark-haired Russian ballet dancer. The young woman was charmed by the artist she had never heard of and later professed: 'He told me that I had saved his life, but I had no idea what he meant.' (J. Richardson et al, Picasso and Marie-Thérèse: l'amour fou, exhib. cat., Gagosian Gallery, New York: 2011, p. 13). What followed was an extraordinary period of creativity which decisively steered Picasso's aesthetic in new directions, re-establishing his deep interest in sculpture and forging a new pictorial language which remains among his most popular and sought-after, as exemplified by the celebrated paintings Le Rêve of January 1932 (Private Collection) and Femme nue, feuille et buste, 1932 (Private Collection). Guggenheim curator Robert Rosenblum asserted, 'there is no doubt that 1932 marks the peak of fever-pitch intensity and achievement, a year of rapturous masterpieces that reach a new and unfamiliar summit in both his painting and his sculpture' (Picasso and Portraiture, exhib. cat., The Museum of Modern Art, New York, 1996, p. 361). All this was precipitated by Picasso's obsessive artistic and sexual relationship with Marie-Thérèse. Françoise Gilot's remarks on meeting her in Vallauris in 1949 go some way towards helping us understand her influence on the master's life and work: 'I found her fascinating to look at. I could see that she was certainly the woman who had inspired Pablo plastically more than any other. She had a very arresting face with a Grecian profile... She was very athletic; she had that high-color look of glowing good health one often sees in Swedish women. Her form was very sculptural, with a fullness of volume and a purity of line that gave her body and her face an extraordinary perfection' (F. Gilot and C. Lake, Life with Picasso, London: Virago Press, 1964, p. 224). Her appearances in Picasso's work were initially coded so as to hide her existence from Olga. Marie-Thérèse's influence was instantly palpable however in the increasingly sculptural aspect of his paintings. It would eventually manifest itself fully in the proliferation of images either of luxuriant sleeping nudes or strong active figures: nymphs emerging from the water; Daphne appearing from a thicket (Femme au jardin, Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofia); or monumental athletic figures disporting themselves on a beach. Marie-Thérèse loved to be outdoors and was an enthusiastic athlete. In contrast with the more complex compositions of the large oils from late 1931 and early 1932, the present work retains a restrained and a meditative quality infused with tenderness. It focuses on the ethereal aura around the girl's head and highlights the 'Greek' profile the artist so admired. The series of drawings of Marie-Thérèse can be traced to the early years of their courtship. Some were clearly drawn from life while others are likely to have been inspired by the photographs Picasso took of his lover. The simplicity of both color and composition in this watercolor are very rare indeed. Picasso purchased the Château de Boisgeloup in 1931 as a refuge from the bourgeois surroundings of his Paris apartment. It gave him space to work on a larger scale and importantly a secret haven to meet with Marie-Thérèse. Boisgeloup had enough space for the artist to set up a sculpture studio in the large stables, as well as Louis Fort's printing press which was installed in the adjacent space. Interestingly, four months after he painted Marie-Thérèse de Profil and dedicated it to Louis Fort, Picasso created a series of drypoint etchings entitled Sculpture, Tête de Marie-Thérèse. Their composition is closely linked to the present lot. This body of work clearly shows the evolution of his compositions from drawing to sculpture to printmaking and emphasizes the central role the young woman played in the process. Boisgeloup saw the creation of Picasso's celebrated series of monumental sculptural plaster busts of Marie-Thérèse of 1931, which are closely related to the present work. They are marked by a remarkable sense of presence as well as sexual energy. The volumes of his lover's head are built up with forms derived from sexual organs, a device often used in Neolithic and Oceanic art and something Picasso continued to employ most overtly in his paintings, for example in Le Rêve of 1932. That summer saw his first retrospective at Galerie Georges Petit, co-curated by Paul Rosenberg and Georges Wildenstein.
The great canvases of his young lover were shown alongside earlier work, making it impossible for his wife to ignore the scale of his fascination and obsession with his new muse. Olga seemingly never found out Marie-Thérèse's identity and whereabouts and there is no evidence that the two women ever met. Picasso's apprehension about the two women encountering each other is however obvious in a series of works which clearly depict them. Olga is cast as the violent aggressor, attacking the pliable and innocent figure of Marie-Thérèse. These images betray the artist's anxiety while at the same time perversely fantasize about an imagined dramatic spectacle of confrontation between the two women. Marie-Thérèse became pregnant in December 1934, which precipitated the artist filing for divorce from Olga. Their daughter Maya was born in the autumn of 1935, at the same time that he met Dora Maar, a photographer of genius and an artist who moved in the Surrealist circle. By the late 1930s, he was dividing his time between the two women, unable or unwilling to choose one companion. The serene, loving and peaceful mother of his child provided a calm and steadying influence on him, while Maar, complex, creative and worldly, invigorated his imagination and spurred on different creative impulses. Marie-Thérèse's allure remained. As he wrote to her in the summer of 1939 when she was installed at Royan and he was with Dora Maar in Antibes, 'I love you more every day. You mean everything to me. And I will sacrifice everything to you...Our love will last forever.' (J. Richardson, op. cit., p. 55).
