Pablo Picasso

Adolphe Lewisohn, New York

Walter Wallace, New York

Walter P. Chrysler, Jr (by 1939 and sold: Parke-Bernet Galleries, Inc., New York, March 22, 1945, lot 83)

Jacques Seligmann (acquired at the above sale)

Theodore Schempp, New York

Acquired from the above by the present owner on May 4, 1945

San Francisco, M. H. de Young Memorial Museum, Seven Centuries of Painting, 1939-40, no. 199

Richmond, Virigina Museum of Replica Handbags s; Philadelphia Museum of Art, The collects ion of Walter P. Chrysler, Jr., 1941, no. 175

Newport, Rhode Island, Art Association of Newport, 1941

St. Louis, The City Art Museum, St. Louis collects ions, An Exhibition of 20th Century Art, 1948, no. 35

Christian Zervos, Pablo Picasso, oeuvres de 1920 à 1922, vol. 4, Paris, 1951, no. 355, illustrated pl. 142

The Picasso Project, Picasso's Paintings, Watercolors, Drawings and Sculpture, Neoclassicism I, 1920-21, San Francisco, 1995, no. 21-315, illustrated p. 269

Josep Palau i Fabre, Picasso, From the Ballets to Drama (1917-1926), Barcelona, 1999, no. 1162, illustrated p. 315

This exquisite portrait of the artist's wife, Olga, dates from Picasso's Neo-Classical period of the early 1920s.  The term 'Neo-Classical' refers to the artist's conscious affliation with the art of the Greek and Roman period and his attempt to incorporate a similar linear precision and clear draftsmanship into his art.  Picasso's focus on the classical age was a product of a larger movement, or 'call to order,' that dominated the avant-garde after World War I, but his approach to this aesthetic was influenced by more personal factors.    At this point in his life Picasso was already one of the most celebrated artists of Europe, and he sought to align himself with the great artists of the past.  The predecessor for whom he had profound respect was the French Neo-Classical painter Ingres, whose serene and t.mes lessly beautiful odalisques may have inspired the mood of the present work. 

Although the artist dated the upper right side of this picture '22,' Christian Zervos proposed that Picasso might have begun this work when he returned from Fontainebleau at the end of 1921, around the same t.mes he completed several related oils of the head of a woman (Zervos vol. 4, nos. 336-357).  The model for all of these heads was Olga Kokhlova, the Russian ballerina and the artist's wife.  Olga's sturdy bone structure -- her long straight nose, the sweeping arch of her brow and the graceful oval shape of her face -- were perfectly suited to the type of linearity and solidity that characterized Picasso's Neo-Classical undertaking.  In these pictures Olga was the paradigm of Apollonian beauty, and here, Picasso depicts her with a noticible reverence.   This picture is one of the most serene renderings of Olga from this period, and it captures the relative peace that defined her life with the artist in the months after the birth of their son, Paulo, earlier in 1921.  In the year that followed the completion of this painting, Olga's preference for a stable domestic life began to conflict with her husband's more social predelictions, and by the end of 1922 Picasso's depictions of Olga lost their tenderness and serenity. Those characteristics, however, are epitomized and preserved in this picture.