Pablo Picasso

La Femme au chat was executed during Picasso’s first trip to Paris in the autumn of 1900, where he travelled with his friend the painter Carles Casagemas. As with other works of this period, this pastel evokes the fin-de-siècle Symbolism of artists as diverse as Toulouse-Lautrec and Munch. Reproductions of Toulouse-Lautrec’s paintings had appeared in French newspapers that were available in Barcelona and were well known to Picasso before he arrived in Paris, but the first-hand experience of these canvases and the decadent culture they portrayed increased his admiration for them and for the tradition in which they were painted. In the present work, the graceful and stylised delineation and the juxtaposition of planes of blue and green tones with the bright red of the woman’s hair, lips and necklace, all bear testament to the important influence these artists had on the young Picasso.

1900 was in many ways a pivotal year for Picasso’s career: his painting Last Moments (John Richardson, A Life of Picasso, London, 1991, vol. I, p. 159) was selected for the Exposition Universelle in Paris, which was the catalyst for his first trip to the city in October. This trip was not only an opportunity for Picasso to embrace the metropolis and its artistic avant-garde, but was also a success financially, as he met the dealer Pedro Mañach who offered him his first contract. The witty interplay between the cat on the woman’s lap with its elongated tail and a young man’s portrait on the wall is characteristic of the subtle erotic undertones often present in works executed during Picasso’s youth, while at the same time anticipating the more overtly sexual imagery of his older age. The predominantly blue colouration of La Femme au chat, the woman’s elongated features and curve of her body, are all elements which herald the development of Picasso’s celebrated Blue period that was to culminate in the following years.