Pablo Picasso

Carlo Frua de Angeli, Milan

Jacques Lindon, New York

Else Sackler, New York

Private Collection (by descent from the above and sold: Christie's, New York, November 8, 2000, lot 45)

Acquired at the above sale by the present owner

Christian Zervos, Pablo Picasso, oeuvres de 1932 à 1937, vol. 8, Paris, 1955, no. 67, illustrated pl. 30 (illustrated without the signature)

The Picasso Project, Picasso's Paintings, Watercolors, Drawings and Sculpture: Surrealism 1930-1936, San Francisco, 1997, no. 32-176, illustrated p. 152

In 1932, the 51-year-old Picasso painted some of his most celebrated portraits of his significantly younger mistress, Marie-Thérèse Walter.  He had met her in Paris some years before when she was only a teenager, and the wealth of images she inspired during the late 1920s and early 1930s has been acclaimed as one of the greatest achievements of the artist's career. Picasso's relationship with Marie-Thérèse was kept a well-guarded secret, not only because of his marriage to Olga Kokhlova, but because of her age.   Nevertheless, in 1931 her presence - which had already begun to infiltrate his work, notably in the series of bathers at Dinard in 1928 and 1929 - became the catalyst for a crucial new departure in his work.   This picture, painted in 1932, is a rare dual-portrait of the artist watching his young lover as she sleeps. 

It is in works such as Les amants that Picasso most successfully celebrated Marie-Thérèse's full, passive and youthful beauty. Abandoning the parallel strands of geometric figuration and Surrealist deformation that characterized much of his work of the 1920s, Picasso began to use emphatic arabesques and ample, harmonizing curves. Early in 1930 the artist provided his young lover with an apartment at 44, rue la Boètie, not far from where he and Olga lived. Soon afterward he bought the seventeenth-century Château de Boisgeloup near Gisors, where he was able to spend time with his young mistress away from his family. There he began to make massive plaster sculptures inspired by her classical profile and strong athletic body, a type of blonde beauty which had now become for him the personification of erotic desire (see fig. 1).  In this painting, Marie-Thérèse is recumbent, while a male figure, understood to be the artist himself, watches over her while holding a source of illumination.  Replete with symbolism, the composition reminds us that it is indeed the artist's hands from which this image is created (see fig. 3).    

The theme of the sleeping woman recurred in a series of works that explored his mistress in different reclining poses, nude, with her arms raised and crossed above her head (see fig. 2). The image of sleep and the way in which Marie-Thérèse appears to lose herself in its oblivion links this work, through the association with the unconscious, with Picasso's most fertile Surrealist images. Roland Penrose, commenting on the series, notes: "Most of these figures painted with flowing curves lie sleeping, their arms folded round their heads ... The sleeper's breasts are round and fruitlike and her hands finish like the blades of summer grass. The profile of the face, usually with closed eyes, is drawn in one bold curve uniting forehead and nose above thick sensuous lips" (Roland Penrose, Picasso, His Life and Work, London, 1958, p. 243).

Writing about another of these sleeping women, Robert Rosenblum makes this point: "The eruptive force of Picasso's passion could even be translated into language; for in words as well, he made love to Marie-Thérèse, describing her rapturously and chromatically in the image-ridden, unpunctuated flow of his poetry of 1935, [with] her ‘cheveux blonds’ and her 'bras couleurs lilas’ " (Picasso and Portraiture: Representation and Transformation (exhibition catalogue), Museum of Modern Art, New York; Galeries Nationales du Grand Palais, Paris, 1996-97, p. 345).

The frank and uncomplicated avowal of Picasso's desire and love for Marie-Thérèse is particularly evident in this work, and serves as a reminder that for her, too, this period was a happy and fulfilling one. As she said many years later, "He covered me with his love."

The present work was once in the collection of Carlo Frua de Angeli, who was the second husband of the American sculptor, Mary Callery.  Callery was a friend of Picasso's and knew him well in the 1920s, when both artists were exhibiting their work in Paris.   

Fig. 1, Marie-Thérèse Walter, circa 1930

Fig. 3, Picasso's hands, photograph by André Villers

Fig. 2, Pablo Picasso, Femme couchée, 1932, Musée National d'Art Moderne, Centre Georges Pompidou, Paris