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Lot Essay
In July 1933, Pablo Picasso, his wife, Olga, and their young son, Paulo, decamped from Paris to Cannes, in the south of France. For their annual sojourn to the Côte d'Azur the family stayed in the Hôtel Majestic. By this time, however, the couple’s marriage was had deteriorated beyond repair. In 1927, Picasso had met Marie-Thérèse Walter—a young, French woman who was in almost every way Olga’s opposite. She reinvigorated the artist and his art, perhaps most famously inspiring the series of large-scale, vibrantly colored and erotically charged nudes and portraits that he famously debuted in his landmark Galerie Georges Petit retrospective in 1932. Olga and Paulo do not appear in Picasso’s art of this summer; instead it is the image of Marie-Thérèse, who was not with Picasso, but holidaying in Biarritz, that filled the classically-inspired works on paper that the artist created over the course of his vacation, of which the present work is one.
Picasso’s summer sojourns in the south always unlocked the classical side of his personality, putting him in an exultant mood that inspired many of his most serene fantasies, as he colored his personal mythos with the aura of antiquity. Yet in the summer of 1933, Picasso had fallen under the spell of Surrealism. As a result, his Cannes works on paper—the artist did not create any oil paintings this summer—demonstrate a synthesis of these two styles, combining classical characters and motifs with often surreal settings, as the artist poured his fantastical imaginings onto paper. As John Richardson has described, “The drawings, watercolors, and gouaches dating from this summer at Cannes are what Picasso had in mind when he claimed 1933 as the only time his work could be described as surrealist, given their surrealist cadavre exquis technique… Other drawings from July and August tell different kinds of stories, from chagrin d’amour to macabre fairy tales… Tottering columns form an archway in which Marie-Thérèse makes an apparition. She is all too evidently unavailable to him” (A Life of Picasso, The Minotaur Years, 1933-1943, New York, 2021, pp. 35-36).
In front of an idyllic seascape and azure sky, the unmistakable profile of Marie-Thérèse appears in La belle et la bête, pictured gazing at a framed picture or perhaps a mirror that contains a portrayal of what appears to be the two figures, the “beauty and the beast,” of the work’s title. The scene is watched over by a minotaur head perched upon a classical column. The minotaur was a key motif of Picasso’s work at this time and a frequent stand-in for the artist himself—Picasso had pictured this half-man, half-beast for the cover of the Surrealist journal, Minotaure, in June 1933, shortly before his summer vacation.
The concept of watching and being watched dominates Picasso’s depictions of Marie-Thérèse. She frequently appears as a classical bust, standing sentinel over a scene. In Le Miroir of 1932, her outstretched body is reflected in a mirror behind her, while in Nude, Green Leaves and Bust of the same year, Picasso not only included his model nude and in sculptural form, but also included the shadowy imprint of his own profile overlooking this interior realm. This idea of observation is present too in La belle et la bête, as Marie-Thérèse and the minotaur appear to look watchfully at the amorous scene playing out in the framed image before them.
Picasso’s summer sojourns in the south always unlocked the classical side of his personality, putting him in an exultant mood that inspired many of his most serene fantasies, as he colored his personal mythos with the aura of antiquity. Yet in the summer of 1933, Picasso had fallen under the spell of Surrealism. As a result, his Cannes works on paper—the artist did not create any oil paintings this summer—demonstrate a synthesis of these two styles, combining classical characters and motifs with often surreal settings, as the artist poured his fantastical imaginings onto paper. As John Richardson has described, “The drawings, watercolors, and gouaches dating from this summer at Cannes are what Picasso had in mind when he claimed 1933 as the only time his work could be described as surrealist, given their surrealist cadavre exquis technique… Other drawings from July and August tell different kinds of stories, from chagrin d’amour to macabre fairy tales… Tottering columns form an archway in which Marie-Thérèse makes an apparition. She is all too evidently unavailable to him” (A Life of Picasso, The Minotaur Years, 1933-1943, New York, 2021, pp. 35-36).
In front of an idyllic seascape and azure sky, the unmistakable profile of Marie-Thérèse appears in La belle et la bête, pictured gazing at a framed picture or perhaps a mirror that contains a portrayal of what appears to be the two figures, the “beauty and the beast,” of the work’s title. The scene is watched over by a minotaur head perched upon a classical column. The minotaur was a key motif of Picasso’s work at this time and a frequent stand-in for the artist himself—Picasso had pictured this half-man, half-beast for the cover of the Surrealist journal, Minotaure, in June 1933, shortly before his summer vacation.
The concept of watching and being watched dominates Picasso’s depictions of Marie-Thérèse. She frequently appears as a classical bust, standing sentinel over a scene. In Le Miroir of 1932, her outstretched body is reflected in a mirror behind her, while in Nude, Green Leaves and Bust of the same year, Picasso not only included his model nude and in sculptural form, but also included the shadowy imprint of his own profile overlooking this interior realm. This idea of observation is present too in La belle et la bête, as Marie-Thérèse and the minotaur appear to look watchfully at the amorous scene playing out in the framed image before them.