Lot 60
  • 60

Pablo Picasso

Estimate
1,800,000 - 2,800,000 USD
bidding is closed

Description

  • Pablo Picasso
  • Le Baiser
  • Dated 22-II-XXX (on the reverse)
  • Oil and charcoal incised on wooden cabinet door
  • Panel: 18 5/8 by 25 1/4 in.; 47.2 by 64.1 cm
  • Cabinet door: 22 by 27 in.; 55.9 by 68.6 cm

Provenance

Estate of the Artist

Marina Picasso, France (by descent from the above)

Galerie Jan Krugier, Ditesheim & Cie, Geneva

Acquired from the above on November 15, 2001

Exhibited

Miami, Center for the Fine Arts, Picasso at Work at Home (Selections from the Marina Picasso Collection), 1985-86, no. 58, illustrated in the catalogue

Yomiuri Simbun Sha, Japan, Associations of Art Museums, Exhibition Pablo Picasso, Marina Picasso Collection, 1986-87, no. PM-10, illustrated in the catalogue

Hanover, Sprengel Museum, Pablo Picasso, Wege zur Skulptur, Die Carnets Paris und Dinard von 1928 aus der Sammlug Marina Picasso, 1995, no. 6, illustrated in color (in the supplement to the catalogue)

New York, Pace Wildenstein, Picasso & Drawing, 1995, no. 42, illustrated in the catalogue

New York, Jan Krugier Gallery, "Traces," Primitive and Modern Expressions, 2001-02

New York, Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, Picasso Black and White, 2012-13, no. 32, illustrated in color in the catalogue 

Literature

Christian Zervos, Pablo Picasso, oeuvres de 1926 à 1932, Paris, 1955, vol. VII, no. 313, illus. pl. 128 (titled Tête)

Picassos SurrealismusWerke 1925-1937 (exhibition catalogue), Kunsthalle Bielefeld, Bielefeld, 1991, no. 13, illustrated in the catalogue p. 226 (titled Tête)

Catalogue Note

Painted in 1930, Le Baiser is a bold, linear rendering of a kissing couple painted on a cabinet door. In the present work, the two figures are depicted in profile, filling the board with an explosive force. When the artist completed this grippingly imaginative composition, he was at the end of his involvement with the Surrealist movement. Limiting his palette to two contrasting colors of black-and-white, Picasso relied upon the cinematic effect of transparency to create this phantasmagoric image. When we regard Le Baiser in isolation, the central focus appears to be two transparent heads with a dagger-like tongues projecting from the figure’s mouths.  In other versions of this theme, the artist's ghostly head is much more legible, often relegated to the edge of the composition while the sharp-toothed monster looms large in the center of the composition. But here, Picasso has united the two images through the bites of the vagina dentata as a dramatic metaphor for the confrontations occurring in his marriage. This dramatic period is captured with expressive force in this sharp black-and-white rendering of the artist and his first wife Olga.

The art critic David Sylvester provides us with precise and compelling description of the use of black-and-white in Picasso’s oeuvre stating, “The need to isolate often governs Picasso’s use of colour. At different times he isolates blue, pink, black-and-white, and so on. This has both a positive and a negative aspect. The positive is the assertion of the chosen colour; it’s often said that Velàzquez and Goya made a colour of black; Picasso’s black-and-white pictures isolate this strain in the Spanish tradition. The negative aspect is that absence of variety in the colour helps to isolate qualities of form. Thus black-and-white tends to be used in ambitious and complex compositions like L’Atelier de la Modiste, Guernica, The Charnel House, and the first Meniñas. It has been said that the absence of colour from Guernica and the Charnel House has to do with their tragic content, but this doesn’t square with its absence from the other pictures. What all four pictures have in common is that they are larger canvases with more figures in them than most Picassos. Black-and-white, then, seems to have been used because managing a complicated composition was enough without having to organize contrasts of colour as well, just as the reduction of colour to grisaille in Analytical Cubism resulted from the pressure of its intricate problems of form” (D. Sylvester, About Modern Art: Critical Essays 1948-2000, London, 2002, pp. 80-81).

Echoes of Le Baiser can be found in in Cy Twombly's Blackboard paintings, executed between 1967 and 1971. Twombly's interest in Picasso's work went as far as Twombly painting his own copy of a work by Picasso which now hangs in the dining room of his former assistant, Nicola del Roscio's home in Gaeta, Italy. The support Le Baiser is painted on, a cabinet door, complete with existing hardware, is found in select other works by the artist including Figure, painted in the same year, now in the collection of the Musée National Picasso, Grenoble. Picasso's use of everyday objects in his work dates back to 1912 when he incorporated a piece of woven chair into a collage composition; the artist would also use found objects in his sculpture process, incorporating pieces of broken ceramic vessels, shutter handles, bicycle seats which would later be cast into bronze. Le Baiser is a shockingly modern work, daring in composition, material and execution.