Pablo Picasso

Galerie Cardo, Paris
Acquired from the above

Paris, Galerie André Weil, Exposition Picasso, au profit du Musée d'Antibes, 1952
Lyon, Musée des Beaux-Arts, Palais Saint-Pierre, Picasso, 1953
New York, The Museum of Modern Art, Pablo Picasso, 1980 (not illustrated in the catalogue)

While Picasso was working in the Antibes Museum (Palais Grimaldi), he adopted a small owl with an injured leg that had been found hiding in a corner. Françoise Gilot and Picasso tamed the bird and brought it back with them to Paris, keeping it in the kitchen of the studio on the rue des Grands Augustins, where they also kept pigeons, canaries, and turtle doves.  Françoise describes Picasso’s reactions to the owl in her memoirs:  “Every time the owl snorted at Picasso he would shout, “Cochon, Merde,” and a few other obscenities, just to show that he was even worse-mannered than him, but Picasso’s fingers, though small, were tough and the owl didn’t hurt him. Finally the owl would let him scratch his head and gradually came to perch on his finger instead of biting it, but even so, he still looked very unhappy” (Francoise Gilot, My Life with Picasso, New York, 1964).  

The present work was painted in January 1947, the same month as five other versions of the same subject (Zervos vol. 15, nos. 19, 22, 34, 35, 36) and two lithographs. By March, he put his bad-tempered pet back in his cage –Hibou en cage (Zervbos vol.15, no.43) – but he liked him well enough to use his form in a number of ceramics and sculptures.