Elegantly and vividly rendered, Saltimbanque accoudé is a jewel-like distillation of Pablo Picasso's storied Neo-Classical output. Executed on 26 December 1922, Saltimbanque accoudé is the most masterful iteration of a small group of works completed during the winter of 1922 that depict seated Saltimbanques. Works of this subject matter executed shortly thereafter belong to prestigious institutional collections including The Museum of Modern Art, New York, the Wadsworth Atheneum, Hartford, the Artizon Museum, Tokyo and the Musée Picasso, Paris (see fig. 1).

Saltimbanque accoudé represents the apogee of Picasso's Neoclassical phase, which lasted from 1917 until 1924. Seeking a departure from Cubism, Picasso ventured to Italy alongside Jean Cocteau in 1917 and 1921 to examine the Latinate origins of art in Naples and Pompeii. Aligning with the broader “call to order” that dominated the avant-garde in post-World War I France, Picasso's style channeled the grandeur of Greco-Roman art and the elegance of Neoclassical works by Ingres (see figs. 2 and 3).

Evidencing the artist's precise draftsmanship, the commanding black lines of the present work generate a formal monumentality evocative of Classical sculpture. Discussing the works in this series, Josep Palau i Fabre has observed that: "The ltalianism of the period is underlined, as from the end of the year, by the presence of a young harlequin or acrobat on a chair, who adopts a wide variety of postures, although his legs are always crossed and his expression invariably one of preoccupation. Who is this harlequin? What do his preoccupation and his… poses mean? He may be a transposition or transpositions of the artist himself embodied in the harlequins and saltimbanques he may have seen at Christmas in Les lnvalides or elsewhere in Paris, allowing him to camouflage his feelings, or (I should say) a single feeling expressed through different media: Indian ink, sepia, sanguine and watercolor" (Josep Palau i Fabre, Picasso: From the Ballets to Drama (1917-1926), 1999, Cologne, p. 354).

Saltimbanque accoudé is a superlative depiction of one of the most distinctive characters in the artist’s oeuvre. As Picasso was ceaselessly fascinated by marginal individuals within society, saltimbanques and harlequins figured prominently within the artist's early output. from Rose and Blue Period masterworks such as Les Deux saltimbanques and Famille de saltimbanques to his subsequent Cubist works (see figs. 4 and 5). Picasso's lover Fernande Olivier wrote of Picasso's early visits to the Cirque Medrano, noting that Picasso “would stay there all evening talking with the clowns. He admired them and had real sympathy for them” (quoted in Theodore Reff, “Harlequins , Saltimbanques, Clowns and Fools,” Artforum, vol. 10, October 1971, p. 33).

Picasso's commitment to portraying these figures would have a lasting impact upon artists and writers alike. The German poet Rainer Maria Rilke was so struck by Picasso's saltimbanques that he went on to write the fifth of his Duino Elegies on the subject: "But tell me, who are they, these wanderers even more transient than ourselves, who from their earliest days are savagely wrung out by a never satisfied will...?" (Rainer Maria Rilke. Duino Elegies, The Fifth Elegy). Viewing such itinerant circus performers at the Commedia dell'Arte during his excursions to Italy in the late nineteen-teens and early nineteen-twenties revived his interest in this subject. Energized by refined yet striking contrasts of rich color, the present saltimbanque is imbued with a dignified air. His distinctive cross-legged pose and pensive gaze conjure a portrait that is at once distinctly modern and eternally beautiful. The specific care and handling of the media in the present work—brush and ink carefully delineating contours of drapery and body while bright yellows and reds further fortify the strength of the artist’s line—single out this particular composition within Picasso’s larger production at the time. The level of detail in the caning of the chair provides a subtle nod to the tromp l’oeil effects he and Georges Braque pioneered in their cubist explorations of the preceding decade (see fig. 6).

Saltimbanque accoudé is further distinguished by its provenance history. First in the collection of Paul Guillaume, and illustrated on a full page of Waldemar George’s 1929 monograph on Guillaume’s collection, the present work has, since 1937, resided in the collection of the Adler family. Thomas C. Adler acquired Saltimbanque accoudé from the noted dealer Jacques Seligmann. Based in Cincinnati, Ohio, Adler was deeply involved in the visual arts, sitting on the board of the Cincinnati Art Museum for decades and acting as a founder and member of the Contemporary Art Center. Adler further supported the arts in Cincinnati through a series of donations to the museum, including a 1930 surrealist painting by Picasso (see fig. 7). In reflecting on this work Thomas Adler’s daughter Margot has remarked “In his beautiful yellow suit, with evidently somewhat preoccupied, intentional eyes, I always felt that Picasso and the Saltimbanque accoudé shared some kind of secret that neither had to divulge…. When I was young, I decided my father, Picasso, and the Saltimbanque understood each other and took seriously their shared responsibilities to bring beauty into the world, no matter what might be going on in it. Dad's was the generation that lived through two terrible world wars, transformative political and economic crises, and overwhelming 'progress'—rapid material and technological changes that must have seemed then to be happening almost as quickly as ours, today.”

Picasso Celebrating 50 Years