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Lot Essay
Sold with a certificate from Madame Maya Widmaier Picasso dated Paris, le 2 mars 1999.
Les Trois Femmes is one of a number of drawings Picasso executed in the early 1920s that depict naked women playing on the beach. Executed in a smooth refined line that Picasso had derived from Ingres, these drawings exhibit a certain classicism and an invocation of youth and nature that is now seen as part of the prevalent mood of a 'return to order' in Europe in the early 1920s.
The theme of three women was a constant in Picasso's art of this period. In addition to his many studies for the painting Three Women at a Fountain Picasso also produced several bacchanalian scenes and Mediterranean beach scenes that explored a wide variety of compositional variations on the theme of three women. Les Trois Femmes is however a rare work in that it depicts three naked women not reclining nor bathing but actively running along the shoreline. In this the work may be an early working of the idea that reached its culmination in his celebrated oil of 1922 known as The Race.
Les Trois Femmes is one of a number of drawings Picasso executed in the early 1920s that depict naked women playing on the beach. Executed in a smooth refined line that Picasso had derived from Ingres, these drawings exhibit a certain classicism and an invocation of youth and nature that is now seen as part of the prevalent mood of a 'return to order' in Europe in the early 1920s.
The theme of three women was a constant in Picasso's art of this period. In addition to his many studies for the painting Three Women at a Fountain Picasso also produced several bacchanalian scenes and Mediterranean beach scenes that explored a wide variety of compositional variations on the theme of three women. Les Trois Femmes is however a rare work in that it depicts three naked women not reclining nor bathing but actively running along the shoreline. In this the work may be an early working of the idea that reached its culmination in his celebrated oil of 1922 known as The Race.