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Lot Essay
Claude Picasso has confirmed the authenticity of this work.
Pablo Picasso's Femme étendue is a tender, highly-finished drawing in ink and watercolour dating from the end of 1932, at the joyous height of his relationship with Marie-Thérèse Walter. This picture was owned by Oliver Simon, the influential printer and book designer who was co-owner of the Curwen Press, which worked with a number of artists including Barbara Hepworth, Henry Moore and Ben Nicholson. This placed him in contact with a number of artists of the day. Simon died in 1956, and Femme étendue has remained in his family ever since. Femme étendue is filled with bucolic charm as the nude figure of Marie-Thérèse, recognisable because of the distinctive, almost classical profile that he would capture in so many of his paintings and sculptures of this time, reposes on a patterned floor with a pastoral scene stretching behind her. Picasso has tapped into the timeless, almost Classical realm of his imagination in which he set a number of his pictures, often showing artists or musicians with reclining women. Here, however, the woman is shown alone, graceful and statuesque.
Picasso had met Marie-Thérèse around 1927, when she was just 17 years old. As she recalled, ‘I was an innocent gamine. I knew nothing - life, Picasso, nothing. I had gone shopping to the Galeries Lafayette and Picasso saw me coming out of the Métro. He simply grabbed me by the arm and said, “I’m Picasso! You and I are going to do great things together.” I resisted for six months, but you don’t resist Picasso’ (Marie-Thérèse Walter, quoted in B. Farrell, ‘Picasso: His Women: The Wonder Is that He Found So Much Time to Paint’, pp. 64-85, in Life, 27 December 1968, p. 74). Although Marie-Thérèse apparently had no idea who Picasso was, being more interested in sport than in art, she nonetheless became Picasso’s muse, fulfilling his prophecy as he created masterpiece after masterpiece, depicting her in her sensuous splendour while his wife, Olga, appeared increasingly jagged and forbidding in his pictures.
Of all the years of their relationship, it was in 1932, when Picasso began to spend an increasing amount of time with Marie-Thérèse, becoming less concerned with keeping her presence a secret, that she truly emerged into his pictures. This was all the more apparent after the two retrospectives of Picasso’s work that were held at the Galerie Georges Petit in Paris and the Kunsthaus in Zurich. Dating from the end of 1932, Femme étendue depicts a languid Marie-Thérèse gazing pensively out of an open window: a celebration of the intimate sensual universe that they had created for themselves in Boisgeloup and Paris.
Pablo Picasso's Femme étendue is a tender, highly-finished drawing in ink and watercolour dating from the end of 1932, at the joyous height of his relationship with Marie-Thérèse Walter. This picture was owned by Oliver Simon, the influential printer and book designer who was co-owner of the Curwen Press, which worked with a number of artists including Barbara Hepworth, Henry Moore and Ben Nicholson. This placed him in contact with a number of artists of the day. Simon died in 1956, and Femme étendue has remained in his family ever since. Femme étendue is filled with bucolic charm as the nude figure of Marie-Thérèse, recognisable because of the distinctive, almost classical profile that he would capture in so many of his paintings and sculptures of this time, reposes on a patterned floor with a pastoral scene stretching behind her. Picasso has tapped into the timeless, almost Classical realm of his imagination in which he set a number of his pictures, often showing artists or musicians with reclining women. Here, however, the woman is shown alone, graceful and statuesque.
Picasso had met Marie-Thérèse around 1927, when she was just 17 years old. As she recalled, ‘I was an innocent gamine. I knew nothing - life, Picasso, nothing. I had gone shopping to the Galeries Lafayette and Picasso saw me coming out of the Métro. He simply grabbed me by the arm and said, “I’m Picasso! You and I are going to do great things together.” I resisted for six months, but you don’t resist Picasso’ (Marie-Thérèse Walter, quoted in B. Farrell, ‘Picasso: His Women: The Wonder Is that He Found So Much Time to Paint’, pp. 64-85, in Life, 27 December 1968, p. 74). Although Marie-Thérèse apparently had no idea who Picasso was, being more interested in sport than in art, she nonetheless became Picasso’s muse, fulfilling his prophecy as he created masterpiece after masterpiece, depicting her in her sensuous splendour while his wife, Olga, appeared increasingly jagged and forbidding in his pictures.
Of all the years of their relationship, it was in 1932, when Picasso began to spend an increasing amount of time with Marie-Thérèse, becoming less concerned with keeping her presence a secret, that she truly emerged into his pictures. This was all the more apparent after the two retrospectives of Picasso’s work that were held at the Galerie Georges Petit in Paris and the Kunsthaus in Zurich. Dating from the end of 1932, Femme étendue depicts a languid Marie-Thérèse gazing pensively out of an open window: a celebration of the intimate sensual universe that they had created for themselves in Boisgeloup and Paris.