巴布羅·畢加索

signed Picasso and dated 13 Aout 1929 (lower right)
pen and ink on paper
31 by 23cm.
Executed in Dinard on 13th August 1929.

The authenticity of this work has been confirmed by Maya Widmaier Picasso.

Private Collection, France (acquired from the artist)

Sale: Sotheby’s, London, Surrealism: Dreams and Imagery, December 4, 2000, Lot 5

Acquired at the above sale by the present owner

Wernes Spies, Picasso, Malen gegen die Zeit, Düsseldorf, 2006, no. 12, illustrated p. 26

Executed on cream wove paper and hinged to the mount at all four corners. The upper and lower edges of the sheet are unevenly cut. Apart from some slight discolouration to the sheet caused by age, this work is in very good condition.
In response to your inquiry, we are pleased to provide you with a general report of the condition of the property described above. Since we are not professional conservators or restorers, we urge you to consult with a restorer or conservator of your choice who will be better able to provide a detailed, professional report. Prospective buyers should inspect each lot to satisfy themselves as to condition and must understand that any statement made by Sotheby's is merely a subjective qualified opinion.
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Baigneuse au ballon is an extraordinary work, executed in rich black ink and exemplifying the unparalleled inventiveness of Picasso’s art. In 1928 Picasso spent the summer at Dinard on the coast of Brittany. Although ostensibly on a family holiday accompanied by his wife Olga, Picasso had installed his young lover Marie-Thérèse in a nearby pension de jeunes filles and she proved a compelling source of inspiration for the drawings and paintings he produced during his stay. John Richardson describes how, "Whenever possible, Picasso would escape from his wife’s sulks and the stifling atmosphere of their ugly rented house [...] and make for the Plage de l’Ecluse in another part of the town. Marie-Thérèse would be playing ball with some of the children from her holiday home – a scene Picasso would repeatedly portray on the spot over the next few weeks, and from memory laced with fantasy over the next few years" (J. Richardson, 'Picasso and Marie-Thérèse Walter', Through the Eye of Picasso 1928-1934 (exhibition catalogue), William Beadleston Gallery, New York, 1985, n.p.).

In 1929 Christian Zervos published a number of the works inspired by the bathers at Dinard, and in the accompanying text wrote: “In his latest works, as during his cubist period, human forms are merely recollections of reality for Picasso. He turns them into idols of the physical world… It is that complex imagination which allows Picasso to transform beings and things into shorthand, into a kind of ideogram of reality” (C. Zervos, quoted in The Surrealist Picasso (exhibition catalogue), Fondation Beyeler, Basel, 2005, p. 31). This mutative quality marks many of Picasso’s most influential works, and it was the Bathers which made a profound impact on Francis Bacon, who admitted that he was influenced “by those Picasso things which were done at the end of the twenties”, and in 1973 stated that, "having seen a show in Paris in 1928 or 1929 of Picasso’s Dinard bathing pictures, the surrealistic women etc.” he had “realised the possibilities of painting” (F. Bacon quoted in Picasso & Modern British Art (exhibition catalogue), Tate Britain, London, 2012, p. 150).