PABLO PICASSO - Sylvette

 PABLO PICASSO (1881-1973)

Sylvette
dated ‘2.5.54.’ (on the reverse)
oil on canvas
39 1⁄4 x 31 7⁄8 in. (99.8 x 81 cm.)
Painted in Vallauris on 2 May 1954

Provenance

The artist’s estate (no. 13281).

Marina Picasso, Paris, by descent from the above.

Chalette International, New York, by whom acquired from the above.

Acquired from the above by the present owner on 1 June 1986.

Literature

C. Zervos, ‘Images de Picasso, Peintes cette année et exposées à la maison de la pensée française’, in Cahiers d’Art, vol. 1, 1954, p. 73 (illustrated; titled ‘Portrait de Mlle D.’).

J.-P. Ollivier & F. Pagès, ‘Une jeune fille de dix-neuf ans inspire à Picasso son époque la plus souriante: l’époque Sylvette’, in Paris-Match, no. 281, Paris, 21 August 1954, p. 45 (illustrated).

'The Ponytail Period', in Life Magazine, vol. 37, no. 19, New York, 8 November 1954, p. 119 (illustrated).

C. Zervos, Pablo Picasso, vol. 16, Oeuvres de 1953 à 1955, Paris, 1965, no. 292, n.p. (illustrated pl. 94).

Exhibited

Paris, Maison de la Pensée Francaise, Picasso: Deux périodes, 1900-1914 & 1950-1954, July 1954.

Paris, Musée des Arts Décoratifs, Picasso, Peintures 1900-1955, June - October 1955, no. 125, n.p. (illustrated n.p.; titled ‘Sylvette (portrait de Mlle D...)’); this exhibition later travelled to Munich, Haus der Kunst, October - December 1955, no. 118; Cologne, Rheinisches Museum, December 1955 - February 1956; and Hamburg, Kunsthalle-Altbau, March - April 1956.

Bremen, Kunsthalle, Sylvette, Sylvette, Sylvette, Picasso and the Model, February - June 2014, no. 27, pp. 123 & 276 (illustrated pp. 123 & 277; titled ‘Sylvette (Portrait of Mademoiselle D.)’).

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Lot essay

Pablo Picasso and Sylvette David, Vallauris. Photo: © Francois Pages/Paris Match via Getty Images. Artwork: © Succession Picasso/DACS, London 2022.

‘A young girl is here during her holidays. I’m painting portraits of her. This is the first time in my life that I have worked from a model…’

Pablo Picasso

Sylvette is one of a landmark series of around sixty paintings, drawings and sculptures that Picasso made in the spring and summer of 1954, depicting a twenty-year-old blonde woman named Sylvette David. With her long, Brigitte Bardot-esque ponytail worn high on her head – a fashionable style of the time – elegant neck, and refined profile, Sylvette is among the most recognisable of the many women who feature prominently in Picasso’s oeuvre – as well as one of the few with whom the artist was not romantically involved. Her presence in the artist’s life incited an extraordinary body of work. Working directly from life – a process the artist rarely practiced – he painted her time and time again, in a variety of styles and idioms, almost always picturing her in profile. This serial form of portraiture stands as one of the most extensive group of works in Picasso’s oeuvre that was not devoted to lovers or his family.

Present lot illustrated (detail)

Picasso met Sylvette and her fiancé, Tobias Jellinek, an English furniture designer, in Vallauris. Jellinek had a workshop in the Quartier de Fournas, where Picasso also had a studio. He had noticed Sylvette walking past his window, and intrigued by her profile, invited the couple to his home, La Galloise. ‘It was amazing!’ Sylvette recalled of their first meeting with the artist. ‘He was lovely. He put us at ease right away… We sat under a lime tree, Toby and I’ (quoted in Sylvette, Sylvette, Sylvette: Picasso and the Model, exh. cat., Kunsthalle Bremen, 2014, pp. 118-119).

Sylvette David. Photograph by Andre Villers. Photo: © Adagp Images, Paris, / SCALA, Florence.

The couple gave Picasso one of Jellinek’s chairs as a gift. Constructed with an iron framework filled out by rope and felt, with two round balls at the end of the arms, the chair was so impractical for sitting that it delighted Picasso, reminding him of a group of paintings that he had made in the 1930s of Dora Maar seated in a similarly skeletal fauteuil. He subsequently ordered three more chairs from Sylvette and her fiancé – as a result of which, Françoise Gilot recalled, ‘La Galloise was bulging with chairs that were amusing to look at but took up a disproportionate amount of room in view of the fact that no one could sit in them with any pleasure’ (Life with Picasso, New York, 1964, p. 352).

 According to Sylvette, some weeks after they had met, she began to model for Picasso. She recalled, ‘It was March, nice sunshine, and we drank and smoked, drank coffee, not alcohol, and smoked cigarettes, which I learned in England, terrible. So Picasso saw us there and came over the wall with this paper, or was it a little canvas, with a very simple image of a girl with a ponytail. We realised that it was me and off we went to see him. He opened the door and he was so happy… He embraced me; he was so happy to see me: “I want to paint you, paint Sylvette!”’ (quoted in exh. cat., op. cit., p. 119).

Over the course of the following months, the artist completed an expansive series of oil paintings and drawings of the young blonde (Zervos vol. 16, nos. 274-294, 306-315). The works predominantly show Sylvette in full to three-quarter profile, highlighting her youthful silhouette. However, they employ an unusually wide stylistic range, from graceful naturalism to geometric abstraction. Most are painted, like the present work, in monochrome, as if Picasso found the forms and features of Sylvette so absorbing, he had no need for colour. 

Sylvette is one of the most abstract of the group. Here, Picasso has worked in a grisaille palette to convey the essential forms of the seated Sylvette. Her distinctive hair style, which highlights her long neck, and elegant poise are all conveyed with an impressive economy of means, as if Picasso was testing the limits of representation within the genre of portraiture. Her clasped hands, characteristic coat, which had been made by her fiancé, Jellenik, and the high back wicker chair provide a striking contrast to her visage.

‘The challenge posed by Sylvette was in fact the challenge of a new type of woman. At this point Picasso plunged into one of his most extraordinary campaigns of possession... Sylvette seated in an armchair; Sylvette in three-quarter face; Sylvette in profile...and in all the grace of her natural curves, with the neck more or less elongated…’

Pierre Daix

The present painting is a dramatic distillation of some of the defining features of the series. In the more naturalistic portraits painted in a three quarter profile, a shadow falls over part of Sylvette’s face and part of her neck, emphasising her elegant features. Taken as a whole, the painting balances a depersonalised, abstracted approach to the model that is simultaneously highly focused on her defining physiognomy. This experimental style was the result of Picasso’s iterative, almost obsessive quest to capture Sylvette’s likeness.

Pablo Picasso and his model, Sylvette David. Photo: © Francois Pages/Paris Match via Getty Images. Artwork: © Succession Picasso/DACS, London 2022.

Portraiture serves as one of the essential modes of artistic exploration in Picasso’s art. He obsessively portrayed his lovers and those closest to him. In comparison to Picasso’s other female portraits of the early 1950s, which predominantly featured his lover of that time, Gilot, the Sylvette series provides an interesting contrast. As Klaus Gallwitz writes, ‘The [Sylvette] portraits concentrate so single-mindedly on the youthful head that the individual features become subsidiary to the type into which Picasso condensed them. What makes the Sylvette portraits remarkable is that through Picasso’s paintings, this young girl came to typify a whole generation. Young people recognised themselves in these portraits when they saw them in exhibitions or reproductions. The ponytail (which was not an invention of Picasso’s) and Sylvette's high carriage of the head became fashionable styles à la Picasso. For the first time since the war one of Picasso’s portraits had become the idol of a rising generation’ (Picasso at 90: The Late Work, New York, 1971, p. 90).

Pablo Picasso, Jacqueline aux mains croisées, 1954. Musée Picasso, Paris. Artwork: © Succession Picasso/DACS, London 2022. Photo: © RMN-Grand Palais (Musée national Picasso-Paris) / Adrien Didierjean.

The portraits of Sylvette were painted prior to the very first paintings that Picasso made of Jacqueline Roque, the last great love of his life. By this time, Picasso’s relationship with Gilot had broken down beyond repair; she had left the artist and returned to Paris with their children in the autumn of 1953. Jacqueline, whom the artist had met at the Madoura pottery studio, made her entry into Picasso’s work in June 1954, in a pair of large canvases that carry over the elongated neck, profile format, and overall elegance of the Sylvette series (Zervos, vol. 16, no. 324-325). Pierre Daix has written, ‘It suddenly seems as if all the refinement and figurative enrichment elaborated during the Sylvette sequence had been arrived at specifically for this new model, with something fresh in the organization of space around her’ (Picasso: Life and Art, London, 1993, p. 319). Indeed, when asked why Picasso stopped painting her, Sylvette replied simply, ‘He met Jacqueline Roque and he painted her’ (quoted in exh. cat., op. cit., p. 121). As such, Sylvette and the rest of this remarkable series stand as a kind of artistic caesura in the artist’s work, as he moved from his depictions of Gilot and their young children, to instead focus primarily on Jacqueline, the woman who would reign supreme over Picasso’s art for the rest of his life. 

First quote reference: Picasso, quoted in M. Georges-Michel, ‘Picasso,’ in L. Lang, ed., Das Genie läßt bitten: Erinnerungen an Picasso, Leipzig, 1987, pp. 118-132, quoted in Sylvette, Sylvette, Sylvette: Picasso and the Model, exh. cat., Kunsthalle Bremen, 2014, p. 26.

Pablo Picasso and his model, Sylvette David. Photo: © Francois Pages/Paris Match via Getty Images. Artwork: © Succession Picasso/DACS, London 2022.