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Lot Essay
During the First World War, Pablo Picasso began working between two distinctive artistic styles, alternating with apparent ease from a late synthetic cubist vocabulary to a figurative, classically-inspired idiom that would come to dominate much of his output during the opening years of the 1920s. Drawing directly on the artistic achievements of the past, Picasso’s paintings and drawings of these years were in keeping with the prevalent artistic trend then sweeping across Europe. Known as le rappel à l’ordre, or the ‘return to order,’ a term taken from a book of essays by Jean Cocteau, this cultural movement embraced classical themes and subjects, motifs and styles, mining a diverse array of time periods for inspiration, from Antiquity and the Italian Renaissance, to the great French masters of the Eighteenth and Nineteenth centuries such as Nicolas Poussin and Jean-Auguste-Dominique Ingres. The pre-war avant-garde and its exaltation of abstraction and extreme experimentation was replaced by a new form of measured and restrained modernity that embodied values of stability, harmony, and tradition.
Picasso’s engagement with this trend was profoundly influenced by a seminal journey through Italy he had taken in 1917. Commissioned to design the stage-sets for a production of Parade by Serge Diaghilev’s renowned Ballet Russes, the artist travelled south, and while there, he took the opportunity to visit a number of ancient sites and monuments, from the Colosseum in Rome, to the ruins of Pompeii, and the Museo Archeologico Nazionale in Naples. The dancer and choreographer Léonide Massine, who accompanied Picasso on one such visit to Pompeii, later recalled the artist’s exhilaration during their visit: ‘Picasso was thrilled by the majestic ruins and climbed endlessly over broken columns to stand staring at fragments of Roman statuary’ (quoted in J. Clair, ed., Picasso, 1917-1924: The Italian Journey, exh. cat., Palazzo Grassi, Venice, 1998, pp. 79-80). Through the following decade, memories of this trip would continue to inspire and inform his artistic vision, shaping his approach to the human figure and his choice of subject matter.
Executed during the winter of 1923-1924, Femme au voile debout, deux hommes assis is a lyrical work on paper dating from the peak of Picasso’s engagement with this classical ideal, and focuses on an interaction between a trio of figures. Arranged in a series of successive planes, the three characters appear as an interconnected unit—the younger male figure is seated on the ground, a bow in hand, as he looks up at the older, bearded man, who appears to recount a tale, his arm wrapped reassuringly around the youth’s shoulders. Standing behind, an elegant woman clad in a flowing Grecian-style outfit rests her arm slightly on the shoulders of the seated man, her gaze softly trained on the younger figure, as if watching for his reaction. Though Picasso does not make explicit reference to a potential subject in the title of the work, there are certain elements that may suggest the scene was inspired by Homer’s epic poem The Odyssey, and the reunion between Odysseus, Penelope and their son Telemachus, following the hero’s return to Ithaca.
In Femme au voile debout, deux hommes assis, Picasso’s chosen medium also reflects his desire to embrace the art of the past. By using sanguine, a natural red chalk, he was consciously following in the footsteps of the great masters of the Renaissance, such as Leonardo da Vinci, Michelangelo and Raphael. Deftly tracing the contours of the three figures in clear, concise lines, Picasso grants them a palpable monumentality with just a few, delicate marks of his stylus, showcasing his virtuosic understanding and handling of the human body. ‘To me there is no past or future in art,’ he declared in 1923, the same year the present work was begun. ‘If a work of art cannot always live in the present, it must not be considered at all. The art of the Greeks, of the Egyptians, of the great painters who lived in other times, is not an art of the past; perhaps it is more alive today than it ever was’ (‘Picasso Speaks: A Statement by the Artist,’ The Arts, New York, May 1923; quoted in D. Ashton, ed., Picasso on Art: Selected Views, New York, 1972, p. 4).
Picasso’s engagement with this trend was profoundly influenced by a seminal journey through Italy he had taken in 1917. Commissioned to design the stage-sets for a production of Parade by Serge Diaghilev’s renowned Ballet Russes, the artist travelled south, and while there, he took the opportunity to visit a number of ancient sites and monuments, from the Colosseum in Rome, to the ruins of Pompeii, and the Museo Archeologico Nazionale in Naples. The dancer and choreographer Léonide Massine, who accompanied Picasso on one such visit to Pompeii, later recalled the artist’s exhilaration during their visit: ‘Picasso was thrilled by the majestic ruins and climbed endlessly over broken columns to stand staring at fragments of Roman statuary’ (quoted in J. Clair, ed., Picasso, 1917-1924: The Italian Journey, exh. cat., Palazzo Grassi, Venice, 1998, pp. 79-80). Through the following decade, memories of this trip would continue to inspire and inform his artistic vision, shaping his approach to the human figure and his choice of subject matter.
Executed during the winter of 1923-1924, Femme au voile debout, deux hommes assis is a lyrical work on paper dating from the peak of Picasso’s engagement with this classical ideal, and focuses on an interaction between a trio of figures. Arranged in a series of successive planes, the three characters appear as an interconnected unit—the younger male figure is seated on the ground, a bow in hand, as he looks up at the older, bearded man, who appears to recount a tale, his arm wrapped reassuringly around the youth’s shoulders. Standing behind, an elegant woman clad in a flowing Grecian-style outfit rests her arm slightly on the shoulders of the seated man, her gaze softly trained on the younger figure, as if watching for his reaction. Though Picasso does not make explicit reference to a potential subject in the title of the work, there are certain elements that may suggest the scene was inspired by Homer’s epic poem The Odyssey, and the reunion between Odysseus, Penelope and their son Telemachus, following the hero’s return to Ithaca.
In Femme au voile debout, deux hommes assis, Picasso’s chosen medium also reflects his desire to embrace the art of the past. By using sanguine, a natural red chalk, he was consciously following in the footsteps of the great masters of the Renaissance, such as Leonardo da Vinci, Michelangelo and Raphael. Deftly tracing the contours of the three figures in clear, concise lines, Picasso grants them a palpable monumentality with just a few, delicate marks of his stylus, showcasing his virtuosic understanding and handling of the human body. ‘To me there is no past or future in art,’ he declared in 1923, the same year the present work was begun. ‘If a work of art cannot always live in the present, it must not be considered at all. The art of the Greeks, of the Egyptians, of the great painters who lived in other times, is not an art of the past; perhaps it is more alive today than it ever was’ (‘Picasso Speaks: A Statement by the Artist,’ The Arts, New York, May 1923; quoted in D. Ashton, ed., Picasso on Art: Selected Views, New York, 1972, p. 4).