Pablo Picasso

Marina Picasso

Galerie Jan Krugier, Geneva

Private Collection (sold: Christies, London, February 8, 2005, lot 398)

Acquired at the above sale by the present owner

New York, Jan Krugier Gallery, Picasso, petits formats.  Works from the Marina Picasso Collection, 1989, no. 53

Paris, Musée National d'Art Moderne, Centre Georges Pompidou, Picasso, sculpteur, 2000, no. 117

Brassaï and Daniel-Henry Kahnweiler, Les sculptures de Picasso, Paris, 1949, no. 175

Pierre Daix, La vie de peintre de Pablo Picasso, Paris, 1977, discussed p. 386

The Picasso Project, Picasso's Paintings, Watercolors, Drawings and Sculpture: Surrealism, 1930-1936, San Francisco, 1997, no. 33-107, illustrated p. 191

Werner Spies and Christine Piot, Picasso, The Sculptures, Stuttgart, 2000, no. 154, illustration of the bronze cast p. 356 (measuring 24 cm in height)

Brassaï/Picasso Conversations avec la lumière (exhibition catalogue), Musée Picasso, Paris, 2000, photographs of the bronze version p. 198-99

The present work is Picasso's original plaster sculpture of a rooster, which he later cast in bronze in an edition of two at the E. Robecchi Foundry.    This sculpture is one of three renditions of the bird that Picasso created between 1932 and 1933 and is the most legible of all of them.  Picasso created his first version of the rooster in 1932 in both an intermediate and final plaster (Spies no. 134).  The following year, he made two more versions in plaster -- the present work and one currently at the Wilhelm Lehmbruck Museum in Duisburg (Spies no. 155).  Both of these 1933 plasters have a much richer, more intricately worked texture than the 1932 version and evidence the tactile pleasure that Picasso must have experienced while molding the form with his hands.