PABLO PICASSO, (1881-1973)

Femme au béret mauve

Femme au béret mauve
dated '27.3.37' (lower left)
oil on canvas
16 1/8 x 13 in (41 x 33 cm)
Painted on March 27, 1937

The authenticity of this work has been confirmed by Claude Picasso.

Provenance
The artist's estate, no. 12769.
Marina Picasso Collection (the artist's granddaughter; by descent from the above).
Galerie Karsten Greve, Cologne (acquired through Galerie Jan Krugier, Geneva, no. 12769/JK3484 in October 1983).
Hirschl & Adler Modern, New York, no. M2736D.
Acquired from the above by the present owner in 1984.

Literature
D. D. Duncan, Picasso's Picassos, New York, 1961 (illustrated p. 222).
The Picasso Project (ed.), Picasso's Paintings, Watercolors, Drawings and Sculpture, Spanish Civil War, 1937-1939, San Francisco, 1997, no. 37-069 (illustrated p. 30; titled 'Portrait de femme').
J. Palau i Fabre, Picasso: From the Minotaur to Guernica (1927-1939), Barcelona, 2011, no. 916 (illustrated p. 294).

"She has always done just what she wanted – strayed, wandered, changed her way of living... Her long neck carried her head like the moon racing through the clouds... like a ball, a satellite"
- Pablo Picasso quoted in E. Cowling, Visiting Picasso: The Notebooks of Roland Penrose, London, 2006, p. 119.

In Femme au béret mauve, Pablo Picasso captures his 'golden muse,' Marie-Thérèse Walter, in a rainbow of vibrantly rich colors and bold, volumetric shapes. As lover, model and mother to Picasso's eldest daughter, Marie-Thérèse had an intoxicating effect on Picasso, inspiring the artist's most glorious outpourings of his career. Picasso deployed a multiplicity of styles to find new modes of visual expression in the relatively condensed time frame of the 1930s, which is arguably his most innovative period for portraiture. Painted ten years after their initial love affair began, the present portrait is a testament to Picasso's boundless enchantment with Marie-Thérèse, and the perpetual creative inventiveness she inspired within him.

Marie-Thérèse is widely considered Picasso's most mesmerizing muse. Brigitte Léal has written, "Marie-Thérèse incarnated a wild beauty, a sporty and healthy beautiful plant" (Brigitte Léal quoted in A. Baldassari, Picasso and Portraiture: Representation and Transformation, exh. cat., New York, 1996, p. 387). While his earlier portraits of the blonde muse frequently depicted her reading, lounging, or gazing into a mirror against ornamental and decorative backgrounds, Femme au béret mauve portrays Marie- Thérèse in an intimately cropped composition, seated and devoid of any extraneous attributes. Whereas Picasso once characterized her by curvilinear shapes and voluptuous, dreamy forms, by March 1937, Marie-Thérèse was a mother to Picasso's child, a mature woman rather than a naive girl. This transition directly impacted Picasso's artistic treatment of her. As Judi Freeman observes, "By 1936 Picasso's depictions of Walter had shifted from being dual explorations of her personality and sensuality to straightforward recordings of her character" (J. Freeman, Picasso and the Weeping Women, exh. cat., Los Angeles, 1994, p. 166).

Always attracted to Marie-Thérèse's alluring physicality, Picasso focuses the present composition on her distinctive physiognomy and facial features. Her strong Grecian nose and firmly contoured chin appear both face-on and in profile, attesting to Picasso's constant experimentation with abstraction and the reconstruction of the human face on his canvases. Here, he styles her in the realistic details of a fashionable brown fur collar (Picasso was always very attentive to Marie-Thérèse's attire and how it would characterize her). A purple beret sits atop her head, accentuating her sunny blonde tresses that rest right atop her shoulders. Her youthful spirit is illuminated in her creamy, lavender complexion and soft, rose-colored cheeks. Picasso attributed a lunar-like quality to Marie-Thérèse and favored these soft pastels in his treatment of her hair and flesh.

Picasso and Marie-Thérèse's great love affair began nearly ten years earlier, in January 1927, when the then-seventeen-year-old was shopping for a shirt with a Peter Pan collar. Years later, Marie-Thérèse reminisced on their first encounter outside of the Galleries Lafayette Paris: "I was an innocent girl... I knew nothing - either of life or of Picasso... I had gone to do some shopping at the Galeries Lafayette, and Picasso saw me leaving the Metro. He simply took me by the arm and said, 'I am Picasso! You and I are going to do great things together'" (Marie-Thérèse Walter quoted in J. Freeman, ibid, p. 142). At that time, Picasso's marriage to Russian ballerina Olga Khokhlova was rapidly deteriorating. The youthful and naïve Marie-Thérèse, who was twenty-eight years Picasso's junior, offered the artist a jubilant escape from the heightened tensions he felt at home with Olga. Their affair became a well-guarded secret - while Picasso continued to live with Olga and son Paulo next door to his art dealer Paul Rosenberg (for whom his son was named) on the Rue la Boétie in Paris, Picasso hid Marie-Thérèse in a nearby apartment on the same street. Picasso's obsession with Marie-Thérèse only intensified, and he began to mask his erotic passion towards her through coded visual imagery. Picasso began incorporating curvilinear still-life objects such as the guitar to hint at his young muse's lush and voluptuous figure, foretelling the artist's evolving sensual style in color and form which revolved around his new muse. Five still life paintings from the late 1920s incorporate the monograms 'MT' and 'MTP,' a documentation of the early stages of their love affair.

In 1930, Picasso purchased a chateau in Boisegeloup, forty miles north of Paris, where he set up a studio. An escape from Paris and Olga, it was in Boisegeloup that Picasso consumed himself with Marie-Thérèse, producing remarkable and monumental plaster busts between 1931 and 1934. The abstract simplifications of these plaster busts, which share strong similarities to Marie-Thérèse, were widely recognized. Françoise Gilot, a later lover to Picasso, describes the strong physical appeal of Marie-Thérèse to Picasso: "When he went out socially it was with Olga; when he came back bored and exasperated, Marie-Thérèse was always available as a solace...Hers was the privileged body on which the light fell to perfection... Her forms were handsomely sculptural, with a fullness of volume and a purity of line that gave her body and her face an extraordinary perfection... Marie-Thérèse brought a great deal to Pablo in the sense that her physical form demanded recognition. She was a magnificent model" (F. Gilot, Life with Picasso, New York, 1964, pp. 235 & 241-242).

The following year Picasso's marriage to Olga had become unbearable, and he yearned to manifest fully the creative impulse which Marie-Thérèse inspired within him. As a means to discharge the imprisonment he felt in his current marriage, Picasso painted violent and enraged portraits of Olga. Richardson claims this catharsis of sorts enabled the artist to shift his thoughts towards a "languorous, loving painting of a lilac-skinned Marie-Thérèse" (J. Richardson, A Life of Picasso, vol. III, The Triumphant Years 1917-1932, New York, 2007, p. 466). Images of Marie-Thérèse reading, sleeping, or gazing, began to flood Picasso's imagery in a clear stylistic shift: "Marie-Thérèse, now firmly entrenched in both the city and country life of a lover twenty-eight years her senior, could at last emerge from the wings to center stage, where she could preside as a radiant deity, in new roles that changed from Madonna to sphinx, from odalisque to earth mother... [Picasso] becomes an ecstatic voyeur, who quietly captures his beloved, reading, meditating, catnapping, or surrendering to the deepest abandon of sleep" (Robert Rosenblum quoted in A. Baldassari, op. cit., p. 342). Picasso created serene and harmonious compositions of Marie-Thérèse, whose curvilinear shape, bright blonde hair, and clearly delineated profile rendered her instantly recognizable, as in the magnificent portrait, Le Rêve, from January 1932. By July, Picasso could no longer hide these canvases from public view, and he participated in an exhibition held at Galeries Georges Petit in which he revealed these vibrant and luscious portraits of his young lover. It was here that Olga finally became aware of Picasso's affair with Marie-Thérèse when she visited the exhibition and realized that the sunny and dreamy muse in Picasso's portraits were not of her.

Despite the dramatic shift in Picasso's style and subject matter, the artist continued to attempt to conceal his affair from Olga until 1935; it was this year that Marie-Thérèse was pregnant and gave birth to their daughter Maya. Shortly after Maya's birth, Picasso began a new love affair with Dora Maar. Seduced by her quick wit and striking beauty, he spent the summer of 1936 with her. Although Picasso was seeing both Dora and Marie-Thérèse, Picasso's new love affair had no effect on his relationship with Marie-Thérèse. His love for her went unaltered, as Pierre Daix observed: "The mother of Maya – and Maya, too, of course – lost nothing... Dora would be the public companion, while Marie-Thérèse and Maya continued to incarnate private life" (Pierre Daix, Picasso: Life and Art, London, 1994, p. 239). For the next three years, the artist led a double life, shuttling between Marie-Thérèse and daughter Maya who were living in Ambroise Vollard's country home in Le Tremblay-sur-Mauldre, and Dora who was living in Paris.

1937 proved to be a challenging year for Picasso. Not only was conflict rife in his personal life between the competing Marie-Thérèse and Dora Maar, but political events of global magnitude in his native Spain were to affect the artist indelibly. Picasso responded powerfully to this turmoil with a tremendous outpouring of work – creating a series of female portraits...