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Lot Essay
The stark, jagged forms seen in this Buste de femme occur with increasing frequency in Picasso's work of the late 1920s. The idyllic period of stately and serene neo-classical figures, which appear to inhabit a remotely distant time and place, had faded. As Picasso approached the age of fifty, darker and more subversive tendencies, both in the way he sought to express his private life and in his engagement with the art of his time, began to assume the upper hand, and lead his work into a newly dynamic, confrontational and exciting phase. Picasso's relationship with his wife Olga, now more than a decade old, was troubled and already beyond repair, and he had no desire to fix it. Instead, he initiated a liaison with Marie-Thérèse Walter, a girl still in her teens.
Outside the home, the currents of Surrealism, the prevailing avant-garde movement of the day, were swirling around Picasso. While he had long maintained his stance as his own man and was never inclined to join any group, the Surrealist agenda of delving into the subconscious and finding new forms of expression were compellingly relevant to his own aims. Michael FitzGerald has written, "As if darkly mirroring the consonance of Picasso's Neoclassicism with the early years of his marriage to Olga, his immersion in Surrealism corresponded to the dissonance of their subsequent relationship" (in Picasso and Portraiture, exh. cat., The Museum of Modern Art, New York, 1996, p. 324).
The subject of this picture, as in most others during this period in which Picasso depicted women with short and dark hair, is in fact Olga (see lot 82, painted in the same month). Sir Roland Penrose once owned the painting Buste de femme à l'autoportrait, painted several weeks earlier in 1929 (Zervos, vol. 7, no. 248, fig. 1), and learned from Picasso that the bust he painted in it was Olga. The shark-like head, gaping mouth and dangerous rows of teeth in that canvas are apt if expressively hyper-exaggerated features for a woman who had grown increasingly unpleasant to live with. John Richardson has pointed out that that Olga suffered from a bipolar disorder (see his essay "Pablo Picasso's Le repos," sale catalogue, Christie's New York, 2 May 2006, lot 43); Picasso is probably making reference to this condition in the split halves of Olga's face in the present painting. The figure's thorn-like, opposing tongues hint at harsh, sharp words spoken by a personality divided against itself and others.
This vision of a female monster might have been terrifying to behold, if it were not for the comic characteristics that Picasso has also imparted to her. The contesting sides of the woman's head are like Punch and Judy puppets reconfigured by a cubist, and indeed, in these pictures, Picasso breathed new life into his fundamental and long standing cubist conception of form, a field that had largely lain fallow in his figure painting during the height of the Neoclassical period. Another incongruity makes one smile at, rather than shrink from, the wild aspect that Picasso has given Olga in Buste de femme. Here she wears a neat and properly feminine pin-striped blouse, with a broad lace-lined Peter Pan collar. A dyed-in-the-wool Surrealist might have avoided or overlooked such ordinary details derived from the observation of everyday life, things, manners and style, but these elements were a defining aspect in Picasso's own practice of Surrealism, and his idea of painting in general, in which he dealt with reality more directly than earlier in the decade, from both the outside in, and the inside out. In 1943 he told his friend André Warnod, "I am always trying to observe nature. Likeness is important to me, a deeper likeness, more real than reality, to the point of being surreal. This is how I imagined surrealism, but the word was used in an entirely different way" (quoted in B. Léal et al, The Ultimate Picasso, New York, 2000, p. 249).
(fig. 1) Pablo Picasso, Buste de femme à l'autoportrait, February 1929. Private collection. BARCODE 20627096
Outside the home, the currents of Surrealism, the prevailing avant-garde movement of the day, were swirling around Picasso. While he had long maintained his stance as his own man and was never inclined to join any group, the Surrealist agenda of delving into the subconscious and finding new forms of expression were compellingly relevant to his own aims. Michael FitzGerald has written, "As if darkly mirroring the consonance of Picasso's Neoclassicism with the early years of his marriage to Olga, his immersion in Surrealism corresponded to the dissonance of their subsequent relationship" (in Picasso and Portraiture, exh. cat., The Museum of Modern Art, New York, 1996, p. 324).
The subject of this picture, as in most others during this period in which Picasso depicted women with short and dark hair, is in fact Olga (see lot 82, painted in the same month). Sir Roland Penrose once owned the painting Buste de femme à l'autoportrait, painted several weeks earlier in 1929 (Zervos, vol. 7, no. 248, fig. 1), and learned from Picasso that the bust he painted in it was Olga. The shark-like head, gaping mouth and dangerous rows of teeth in that canvas are apt if expressively hyper-exaggerated features for a woman who had grown increasingly unpleasant to live with. John Richardson has pointed out that that Olga suffered from a bipolar disorder (see his essay "Pablo Picasso's Le repos," sale catalogue, Christie's New York, 2 May 2006, lot 43); Picasso is probably making reference to this condition in the split halves of Olga's face in the present painting. The figure's thorn-like, opposing tongues hint at harsh, sharp words spoken by a personality divided against itself and others.
This vision of a female monster might have been terrifying to behold, if it were not for the comic characteristics that Picasso has also imparted to her. The contesting sides of the woman's head are like Punch and Judy puppets reconfigured by a cubist, and indeed, in these pictures, Picasso breathed new life into his fundamental and long standing cubist conception of form, a field that had largely lain fallow in his figure painting during the height of the Neoclassical period. Another incongruity makes one smile at, rather than shrink from, the wild aspect that Picasso has given Olga in Buste de femme. Here she wears a neat and properly feminine pin-striped blouse, with a broad lace-lined Peter Pan collar. A dyed-in-the-wool Surrealist might have avoided or overlooked such ordinary details derived from the observation of everyday life, things, manners and style, but these elements were a defining aspect in Picasso's own practice of Surrealism, and his idea of painting in general, in which he dealt with reality more directly than earlier in the decade, from both the outside in, and the inside out. In 1943 he told his friend André Warnod, "I am always trying to observe nature. Likeness is important to me, a deeper likeness, more real than reality, to the point of being surreal. This is how I imagined surrealism, but the word was used in an entirely different way" (quoted in B. Léal et al, The Ultimate Picasso, New York, 2000, p. 249).
(fig. 1) Pablo Picasso, Buste de femme à l'autoportrait, February 1929. Private collection. BARCODE 20627096