Pablo Picasso

Galerie Chalette, New York
Private Collection, New York (acquired from the above in October 1957)
Thence by descent 

New York, Staempfli Gallery, Picasso: An American Tribute, 1962, n.n.

Tériade, ed., Verve, Revue artistique et littéraire, vol. V, nos. 19-20, 1948, illustrated n.p.
Christian Zervos, Pablo Picasso, Oeuvres de 1944 à 1946, vol. XIV, Paris, 1963, no. 210, illustrated pl. 95
The Picasso Project, ed., Picasso's Paintings, Watercolors, Drawings and Sculpture, Liberation and Post-War Years, 1944-1949, San Francisco, 2000, no. 46-133, illustrated p. 102

Executed on cream wove paper, not laid down, and affixed to the mount at the upper two corners, floating in the mount. All four edges are deckled. The sheet is slightly time-stained. A few, very minor, foxing spots in places, some studio marks. This work is in overall very good condition.
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Executed with a breathtaking economy of line, Combat de faune et de centaure presents two familiar figures from Picasso's 1940s output in a beautiful and idyllic landscape. While they are presented in conflict, with arrows drawn, the faun—whose gender seems somewhat ambiguous—has a faint smile on her face, and the frieze-like arrangement of the figures gives the scene an overarching feeling of calm. Evoking a vision of Arcadian harmony, this sense of stillness could not be further from the reality of a war-weary France. The classical references in so many of Picasso's works from the 1940s were the artist's way of retreating from a continent at war toward the bucolic rural idyll of classical Greece, the antithesis of such a troubled modern-day world.

With these formal devices, Picasso not only alludes to the chaos of wartime but also to his own tumultuous relationship with his companion Dora Maar, her strength and forcefulness felt in the form of the female faun. An artist herself, Dora was famously headstrong, dramatic and demanding, and Picasso later admitted that she came to personify the war in his pictures from this period.