PABLO PICASSO - Buste de femme

 

PABLO PICASSO (1881-1973)

Buste de femme

signed ‘Picasso’ (on the reverse); dated ‘5 juin 41.’ (on the stretcher)

oil on canvas

21√ x 13¿ in. (55.5 x 33.3 cm.)

Painted on 5 June 1941 

A portrait composed of three distinct

viewpoints, Pablo Picasso’s Buste de

femme depicts the artist’s striking and

enigmatic wartime mistress and muse,

Dora Maar. Picasso’s portraits of Dora

Maar have an intense and resonant

power that sets them apart from the

wealth of portraiture that the artist

created throughout his life. In Buste

de femme, Picasso has reimagined a

surreal, distorted vision of his lover’s face,

simultaneously portraying the long, dark

hair of the back of her head and two

sides of her striking profle: her large,

heavily lashed eye, and rounded cheek

and chin, pictured as if as if she was

turning her head or glancing back, caught

in a moment of fux. 

Painted in June 1941, Buste de femme

dates from the midst of the German

Occupation of Paris. By the autumn

of 1940, Picasso had decided, despite

many ofers to aid him in feeing the

country, to remain in the French capital,

living and working in a large studio on

the rue des Grands Augustins. Deemed

a ‘degenerate’ artist by Hitler, Picasso

was forbidden to exhibit his work, and

lived under surveillance, often visited in

his studio by Nazi soldiers. Living in

a city flled with terror and suspicion,

fearing aerial bombardment, sufering

food shortages, curfews and blackouts,

Picasso was undoubtedly afected by

the dire deprivations of war. A sombre,

melancholic and sometimes sinister

mood pervades much of his work from

this period: fgures and still-lifes are

cloaked in shadow, the contorted forms

of his subjects hauntingly emerging from

a dimly lit, terror-flled world. Buste de

femme undoubtedly encapsulates this

wartime sentiment. Emerging from a

muted background, the complex image of

Dora appears, clothed in black. Looking

back on this period after the Liberation

of Paris, Picasso remarked, ‘I have not

painted the war because I am not the

kind of painter who goes out like a

photographer for something to depict.

But I have no doubt that the war is in

these paintings I have done. Later on

perhaps the historians will fnd them and

show that my style has changed under

the war’s infuence’ (Picasso, quoted in

S.A. Nash, ed., Picasso and the War Years

1937-1945, exh. cat., San Francisco &

New York, 1999, p. 13). 

Dora Maar’s image dominated Picasso’s work from 1936

throughout the war until 1945. A photographer and painter, Dora

Maar was involved with the Surrealist circle in Paris. It was the

Surrealist poet, Paul Éluard, who in 1936 introduced Picasso to

this raven-haired, dark eyed woman. Françoise Gilot, Picasso’s

subsequent lover, recalled one of the frst, now legendary,

meetings between the pair that took place at Les Deux Magots

in Paris: ‘[Dora Maar] was wearing black gloves with little pink

fowers appliquéed on them. She took of the gloves and picked

up a long, pointed knife, which she began to drive into the table

between her outstretched fngers to see how close she could

come to each fnger without actually cutting herself. From time

to time she missed by a tiny fraction of an inch and before she

stopped playing with the knife, her hand was covered with

blood’ (F. Gilot & C. Lake, Life with Picasso, New York, 1964, pp.

85-86). Attracted not only to her beauty, Picasso was intrigued

by her strong, enigmatic and often melancholic character, her

creativity and quick intellect, and the pair soon began a deeply

passionate, intense and turbulent love afair. 

As he did with each new woman in his life, Picasso absorbed

every aspect of Dora’s face before deconstructing and

reconfguring her features on the canvas. Her face however,

perhaps more than any other of his lovers, became the basis for

a series of deformations and extreme distortions. Against the

turbulent backdrop of the build up and subsequent outbreak

of war, Dora and Picasso’s intense love afair was indelibly

tinged with the tragedy and trauma of this catastrophic

confict, and the artist’s representations of her refect this.

Angular and fragmented, split into separate pieces, or bulbous

and misshapen, the human form is pushed to the limits

of representation in these portraits; an embodiment of the

savagery and tragedy that was occurring across the world. ‘For

me [Dora is] the weeping woman’, Picasso explained, ‘For years

I’ve painted her in tortured forms, not through sadism, and not

with pleasure, either; just obeying a vision that forced itself on

me. It was the deep reality, not the superfcial one’ (Picasso,

quoted in W. Rubin, ed., Picasso and Portraiture: Representation

and Transformation, exh. cat., New York and Paris, 1996-97,

p. 395). The motif of a bust-length fgure, seen from behind,

with two split profles, as in Buste de femme, clearly intrigued

Picasso and he extensively explored it in both painting and

drawing at around the time this work was painted. In studies

for a monumental work of this period, L’Aubade (1942, Musée

National d’Art Moderne, Paris), which features a reclining fgure

serenaded by a guitar player, Picasso repeatedly depicted

a head composed of two profles, as well as a nude fgure

simultaneously facing towards, and turning away from the artist.

In his cubist years at the beginning of the century, Picasso had

sought to depict objects from multiple viewpoints, unpicking

and thereby revealing the processes of representation. In Buste

de femme, Picasso seems to be undertaking the same action,

dissecting the constituent parts of the subject in front of him.

Yet, by taking the beguiling visage of his lover as his subject, the

painting is immediately charged with a striking psychological

power. Painting her head from every angle, the artist appears

to take possession of his subject, as if attempting to memorise

and comprehend each facet of her image. With this abstracted

and deconstructed portrait, Picasso radically reimagined the

possibilities of portraiture: producing not a mimetic likeness of

his sitter, but instead, a uniquely subjective vision of his lover

and muse.