Picasso 1929

I wanted to become a painter and became… Picasso

Picasso remains the best-known artist of the 20th century. His celebrity, his legend and the myth that surrounds him has assumed a unique role in the way many generations view the work of this enthusiastic, committed, and humanist artist.

Pablo Picasso was influenced from 1925 onwards by surrealist poets, in a companionship that lasted until the mid-1930s. Simultaneous to this movement, Picasso produced works abounding in poetic, erotic and passionate elements, representing one of the most powerful and creative energies of his time. Nevertheless, his work remains more pragmatic than the "dream on canvas" ambition of the surrealists. Femme dans un fauteuil rouge, painted at the beginning of 1929, is a summary of the violent paintings from the previous years, as well as the initial cubist teachings and a new trend found in the 1930s. Figures are shaped as pyramids; eyes are dilated, as are most of his female representations during this phase. This painting, which entranced Georges Bataille, was presented in an exhibition shown at the Georges Petit gallery, in June of 1932. However, it was in the United States that it acquired its status as one of the most important paintings in Picasso’s work, following the retrospective on this artist presented by Alfred H. Barr Jr., the first director of the New York MoMA, Forty Years of his Art in 1939.

These two paintings, the one belonging to the Paris National Picasso Museum and the one included in the Berardo collection, exhibit a certain degree of distress and cruelty, characteristic of the works produced by the artist during this period. "Volumes are named and hues are claimed; lines drawn at random are not abandoned to chance, whispers of the unknown are crystallised in shapes, and infinite order is observed in a single spot", wrote Christian Zervos in the magazine Cahiers d’art, in 1929. Aggressive colours and pictorial tension possess, in Picasso, an expressive violence that represents his ambiguous feelings towards women. The 1927-1929 period is dominated by this disturbing, enigmatic female figure, frequently depicted as a threatening monster. These visions are most probably allusive to marital conflict between Pablo Picasso and Olga Kokhlova, a dancer from the Ballets Russes whom the artist married in 1918.

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