+ Expand

Provenance: Marina Picasso, Paris (by descent from the artist and until at least 1982).
Private collection (circa 1987).
Acquired by the present owner, 1995.

+ Expand

Exhibited: Paris, Grand Palais, Hommage à Pablo Picasso, November 1966-February 1967, no. 105 (illustrated).
Munich, Haus der Kunst; Cologne, Josef-Haubrich-Kunsthalle; Frankfurt am Main, Städtische Galerie and Kunsthaus Zurich, Pablo Picasso. Eine Ausstellung zum hundertsten Geburtstag--Werke aus der Sammlung Marina Picasso, February 1981-March 1982, no. 105 (illustrated).
Venice, Palazzo Grassi, Picasso: opere dal 1895 al 1971 dalla Collezione Marina Picasso, May-July 1981, no. 125.
Melbourne, National Gallery of Victoria and Sydney, Art Gallery of New South Wales, Picasso: Works from the Marina Picasso Collection, July-December 1984, no. 63.

+ Expand

Literature: C. Zervos, Pablo Picasso, Paris, 1949, vol. 3, no. 105 (illustrated, pl. 37).
F. Russoli, L'opera completa di Picasso cubista, Milan, 1972, p. 128, no. 902 (ilustrated).
J. Palau i Fabre, Picasso Cubism (1907-1917), Barcelona, 1990, p. 425, no. 1266 (illustrated).
The Picasso Projects, ed., Picasso's Paintings, Watercolors, Drawings and Sculpture: From Cubism to Neoclassicism 1917-1919, San Francisco, 1995, p. 73, no. 17-249 (illustrated).

+ Expand

Notes: PROPERTY FROM A DISTINGUISHED PRIVATE COLLECTION

The accepted dating ascribed to this painting, 1914-1918, spans an unusually long amount of time for a cubist canvas by Picasso. In the early stages of the evolution of cubism, as Picasso felt his way toward a radically new pictorial language, it took him a few months to work through some preliminary studies, and then in three months, between May and July, 1907, he brought Les demoiselles d'Avignon to a state in which he could work on it no further (Zervos, vol. 2*, no. 18; The Museum of Modern, Art New York). He then labored on Trois femmes for almost half a year (Zervos, vol. 2*, no. 108; State Hermitage Museum, St. Petersburg). But once he had found his way, it normally took him no more than a few days or weeks to complete even a large and complex painting. A four-year spread for a single picture is certainly out-of-the-ordinary--there must be an interesting story here.

It is most unlikely, of course, that Picasso worked on Femme en corset little by little over a period of four years. Picasso was a boldly energetic and decisive painter, a compulsive and indefatigable worker, never a desultory or finicky dabbler, not even in the leanest and most difficult of times, which were by now long behind him. It is more likely that Picasso began the painting in 1914, put it aside for some reason, and then resumed working on it as some later date. The years, one should be quick to notice, coincide with the beginning of the First World War in August 1914, and the time of the armistice which ended it, in November 1918. Events of the day might have had some impact on the progress of this painting. Or perhaps the reasons were mostly and deeply personal.

In his entry for this painting in the Marina Picasso exhibition catalogue (op. cit.), Reinhold Hohl notes that Picasso began this painting in Avignon, where he stayed with his lover Eva Gouel from June through late October or early November in 1914. Picasso met Eva (née Marcelle Humbert) at the Steins' home in the fall of 1911, just as his relationship with Fernande Olivier was deteriorating. Eva had been living with the Polish-born painter Louis Marcoussis. A liaison with Picasso soon developed into a more serious relationship. By early 1912 Eva had become Picasso's "Ma Jolie" (fig. 1). Picasso declared to his dealer D.-H. Kahnweiler, "I love her very much. I will write this in my paintings"--and true to his word, he inscribed a cubist nude "J'aime Eva." John Richardson has written:

"[Picasso, then in his early thirties,] wanted to settle down with a suitably attractive, suitably malleable girl and even get married. He would have never made Fernande his wife: she could not have children. Besides, she was feckless and indolent and too fearful to seek a divorce from Percheron, her abusive husband. Eva, on the other hand, was longing to prove what a perfect little wife, what a gifted maitresse de maison, she would make. To this extent she appealed to Picasso's residual bourgeois streak. She was also pretty, in a pert Parisian way For all her delicacy, Eva could be quite managerial. She soon established a powerful sexual hold over the artist At the same time Eva was very low-key, the perfect mate for someone eager to withdraw from the hurly-burly of Bohemia and concentrate on work without having to worry about domestic details; the perfect mate, too, for someone who was increasingly solicitous of his health and obliged to follow a rigorous diet Braque had settled down happily with a woman named Marcelle. Was it not time Picasso did the same?" (in A Life of Picasso: Volume II, 1907-1917, New York, 1996, p. 228)

Picasso and Eva cut their previous ties and ran away to spend the summer of 1912 together, first in Céret and later in Sorgues, a little town near Avignon. They were joined by Braque and his new wife Marcelle; Pierre Daix called the two couples' summer together "simultaneous honeymoons" (in Picasso: Life and Art, New York, 1993, p.118). Braque made the first papiers collés there in September, and Picasso followed suit a few weeks later when back in Paris. A few days before Christmas, Gertrude Stein wrote to her friend Mabel Dodge Luhan, "We see a great deal of [Picasso and Eva]. They live in this quarter and are very chummy. The new Mme. is a very pleasant hostess and quite a cheerful person Pablo is very happy" (quoted in ibid., p. 271). Picasso took Eva to Barcelona over the holidays to meet his family. The desired marriage seemed to be in the offing; Eva had begun to call herself 'Mme Picasso." But then Picasso's father died, and a wedding had to wait until a period of mourning had elapsed. By the spring of 1913 friends had noticed that Eva was not in good health. "I'm suffering from an angine with a lot of fever," she wrote to Gertrude Stein (quoted in ibid., p. 277). Angine is a general term used for a throat infection. Eva's malady, however, would soon prove to be much more serious: it may have been tuberculosis, but Richardson has surmised that it was more likely cancer, and probably of the lung.

Femme assise dans un fauteuil powerfully announced a new phase in Picasso' work. Cubism now seemed capable of delivering a riveting directness of imagery, arm-in-arm with a more succinct and coherent forms. For the previous three years, during the analytic and hermetic phases of cubism, Picasso had reduced the intelligibility of the figure to a minimum. Now the artist abandoned the prismatic faceting of the analytic approach and instead organized his compositions by stacking much larger planes one atop another, as if he were trimming and pasting down sheets of paper in a papiers collés, the recent innovation which provided the immediate impetus for this rethinking of cubist form. Sub-divided and fractured space had hitherto been an impenetrable wall between the viewer and the supposed object. These new large planes were absolutely flat, but seen in concert with each other they generated the perception that space was unfolding and opening up before one's eyes. Picasso inserted within this new spatial context readily recognizable signs for objects, as he did in the papiers collés.

This was a far more flexible, inclusive and welcoming pictorial approach than Picasso had practiced previously; it connected more readily with the world, and it was certainly more legible and communicative. It provided an interactive formal mechanism that was capable of delivering quickfire visual metaphors and puns, or more subtly layered meanings and subtexts. This would become the new look of synthetic cubism, which introduced into the hitherto austere and gravely beautiful landscape of the cubist sensibility new possibilities of color, and with it, joy, sexuality, and finally--a welcome sense of humor.

This was the cubism that Picasso brought to Avignon in the summer of 1914. From the monochrome moonscape tonality of his previous cubist pictures, Picasso's canvases suddenly burst into verdant splendor (Zervos, vol. 2**, no. 528; fig. 3). Eva had undergone surgery for her condition earlier that year, and she seemed to be on the mend; surely the warm, dry climate of the Midi would do her good. It was during this summer that Picasso stretched a canvas, primed it with gesso studded with grains of sand, and sketched in a composition that became the genesis of Femme en corset lisant un livre. The barest outlines of another composition are visible on the reverse of this canvas. The subject of the painting on the front is surely Eva, reprising the idea seen in Femme assise dans un fauteuil (fig. 2), this time in the context of more serene domesticity. A tell-tale sign is her long flowing hair, seen in the earlier painting and in preliminary studies for it.

It is impossible to assess how far Picasso took this picture with his oil colors that summer. There only a few areas on the canvas that show the overlay of one color over another--in the face, for example. There are no detectable signs of significant reworking or revision. The linear contours are crisp, clear and unretouched, and minute patches of unpainted primed canvas mark the transition between adjoining color shapes. It is reasonable to assume that Picasso began with central passages within the figure of the reading woman, and when he put the picture aside, there may have been some details in these areas that required further attention, but it was mainly the outer sections that remained to be painted in.

One can only speculate why Picasso set this canvas aside. He left another canvases unfinished that summer; among them the very first manifestation of his classical figurative style: Le peintre et son modèle (Daix and Rosselet, no. 723; Musée Picasso, Paris). There was also Arlequin jouant de la guitare (Zervos, vol. 2**, no. 518; fig. 7). The "guns of August" surely disrupted his work. He and Eva traveled to Paris only days before the outbreak of hostilities to empty out his bank account and make sure his foreign identity papers were in order. They returned to Avignon just in time to see Braque and Derain, who had already been mobilized, board a train bound for Paris to join their regiments. "I never saw them again" he said, meaning that the camaraderie among painters that had enriched the pre-war Paris art world was to be no more. Picasso hoped to wait out the course of the war, which no one thought would go on for very long, in Avignon, far from the danger posed by the initial German offensive. Then, in mid-October, Eva suffered a relapse. Picasso wrote to Gertrude Stein to find out if her specialist was available to see Eva--"her operation still has not healed" (quoted in bid, p. 354). Notice how the corset rings and buttons stay visible in the darkened area of the woman's lower torso resemble surgical stitches; Picasso may actually be describing some kind of supportive bandage.

Eva had a second operation in mid-January 1915. She appeared to improve at first, but by the spring her condition was again deteriorating. In November she entered a clinic in the Paris suburb of Arceuil, a long distance from Picasso's studio in Montparnasse. On 9 December, the artist wrote to Gertrude Stein, "My life is hell--Eva is still ill and gets worse every day and now she has been in a nursing home for a month... My life is pretty miserable and I hardly do any work. I run backwards and forwards to the nursing home and I spend half of my time in the Métro." He also included news of a painting: "I've done a picture of a Harlequin that I think in my opinion and several people's opinion is the best thing I have every done" (quoted in ibid., p. 375). Daix completes the text of the letter: "In short, my life is full, and as always, I don't stop" (op. cit, p. 147).

Eva died on 14 December 1915. Picasso wrote to Gertrude Stein, "My poor Eva is dead... This has been a great sorrow for me, and I know you will miss her" (quoted in ibid.). The painting that Picasso mentioned to Stein was Arlequin, late 1915 (Zervos, vol. 2*, no. 555; fig. 4), in which, as Richardson states, "Picasso mourns the dying Eva..." He has pointed out that the partly painted white rectangle is a palette, which contains a profile self-portrait: "Picasso hides yet draws attention to himself, spotlit against the the blackness of Eva's mortal illness and the blackness of war" (op. cit., pp. 375 and 387)

While Picasso was attending to the ailing Eva, and painting Arlequin, he was involved in a liaison with a young dancer named Gabrielle Depeyre, who the mistress of the American-born engraver and poet Herbert Lespinasse. Not long after Eva's passing, Picasso proposed to Gaby. She turned him down. Picasso was having affairs with a woman named Paquerette and a girl from Martinique, when he began to pursue an aspiring young painter named Irène Lagut, who was involved with the artist Serge Ferat. Picasso became obsessed with marrying her; in a bizarre incident, he and Apollinaire got her drunk, abducted her and then locked her in a room. She escaped and returned to Ferat. Irène, who was bisexual, later had an affair with the young novelist Raymond Radiguet, who was Jean Cocteau's lover. Picasso and Irene briefly resumed a liaison in 1923, and remained in touch periodically thereafter.

Reeling from two rejections in a row, Picasso was determined to get married. While in Rome during the summer of 1917, working on the costumes and sets for Diaghilev's Ballets Russes production of Parade, he fell in love with one of the dancers in the troupe, Olga Khokhlova. He courted her tenaciously, notwithstanding the fact that she resolved to remain chaste until she felt marriage was appropriate and a certainty. No matter--Picasso knew he could paint his way to her heart. He made an exquisitely sensitive Ingresque portrait of her in the final month of 1917 (fig. 5). Around this time, in the full flush of this new passion, he pulled out the unfinished portrait of Eva, his last great love, and finished it off. Olga is usually seen with her hair tied up, but like Eva, she also had long flowing tresses, as seen in a painting, also of a woman reading, done in 1920 (Zervos, vol. 4, no. 180; fig. 6). Daix described Femme en corset lisant un livre as "a final farewell to Eva or a last pang of regret" (op. cit., p. 159). Or did Picasso resume and finish this painting primarily because of his new love for Olga? The painting which began as Eva may have been finished as Olga. Perhaps the protective shell of the corset was emblematic of Olga's chasteness. In this happy and contented mood, Picasso also finished the Harlequin he had begun in Avignon during the summer of 1914 (fig. 7).

Picasso kept Femme en corset lisant un livre all his life. Because his marriage to Olga turned out so badly, he would not have prized the painting as a memento of her, but instead of the woman who initially inspired it, "my poor Eva." Daix has written: "Fifty-five years later he spoke to me about Eva with great emotion, not only because she had died late in 1915, after a long and painful illness... but above all she had changed his life" (in Picasso et les femmes, exh. cat., Kunstsammlungen Chemnitz, 2002, p.102). When Daix earlier recounted this same discussion in his biography of Picasso, he put it more poignantly, "When we spoke of her two thirds of a century later, tears came to his eyes" (in op. cit., 1993, pp. 111-112).

(fig. 1) Eva Gouel and Picasso, circa 1912. BARCODE 24408622

(fig. 2) Pablo Picasso, Femme assise dans une fauteuil, Paris, 1913. Sold, Christie's New York, 10 November 1997, lot 22. BARCODE 24408639

(fig. 3) Pablo Picasso, Portrait de jeune fille, Avignon, 1914. Musée National d'Art Moderne, Centre Georges Pompidou, Paris. BARCODE 24408646

(fig. 4) Pablo Picasso, Arlequin, Paris, late 1915. The Museum of Modern Art, New York. BARCODE 24408653

(fig. 5) Pablo Picasso, Olga Picasso dans une fauteuil, Montrouge, winter 1917. Musée Picasso, Paris. BARCODE 24408660

(fig. 6) Pablo Picasso, Femme assise lisant, Juan-les-Pins, 1920. Musée National d'Art Moderne, Centres Georges Pompidou, Paris. BARCODE 24408677

(fig. 7) Pablo Picasso, Arlequin jouant de la guitare, 1914-1917. Private collection. BARCODE 24408684