STEPHEN ONGPIN FINE ART

PABLO Málaga 1881-1973 Mougins

Landscape at Juan-les-Pins

Pencil on buff paper. Dated 13-7-20- in pencil at the upper right. Numbered 1056 / 36 in pencil on the verso. 270 x 422 mm. (10 5/8 x 16 5/8 in.)

Provenance The estate of the artist; By inheritance to the artist’s granddaughter, Marina Picasso, Cannes, Geneva and New York.

Literature Christian Zervos, . Vol.30: Supplément aux années 1920-1922, Paris, 1975, pl.36, no.86 The Picasso Project. Picasso’s Paintings, Watercolors, Drawings and Sculpture: A Comprehensive Illustrated Catalogue 1885-1973. Neoclassicism I – 1920-1921, San Francisco, 1995, p.97, no.20-311.

Exhibited Jerusalem, The Israel Museum, Picasso the Draughtsman: 103 Works from the Marina Picasso Collection, 1993, no.50.

From around 1914, Pablo Picasso began to experiment with a Neoclassical style that was radically different from the explorations in he had been engaged in for the previous seven years. Over the next decade, while continuing to work in a Cubist vein, Picasso concurrently explored a more classical mode of expression, particularly in his drawings. To begin with, this new Neoclassical manner - in which the influence of Jean- Auguste Dominique Ingres is noticeable - was largely reserved for portraiture, but it also came to include figure subjects and landscapes, as is the case with the present sheet. By the 1920s this classical style became particularly associated with a series of summer visits made by the artist to the French Riviera.

Like they had the previous year, Picasso and his newly-pregnant wife Olga spent the summer of 1920 in the South of France. As the artist’s biographer Sir John Richardson has written: ‘By June 29, they had found a villa on a hillside above the yet to be developed resort of Juan-les-Pins next to Antibes. The Villa des Sables on the chemin des Sables, which no longer exists, was a modest house with a good view of the Mediterranean and a small garden…Picasso chose the place because it was quiet and out of the way…and it offered adequate studio space. This summer would prove very productive.’1 Picasso and Olga remained at Juan-les-Pins until September, and during this period the artist was especially prolific as a draughtsman, making numerous drawings and some small paintings. His subjects were mostly depictions of Olga, drawings of bathers on the beach, and vistas of the landscape below the hilltop Villa des Sables, which enjoyed superb views of the coast and bays on either side of the Cap d’Antibes.

Richardson further notes of the artist at Juan-les-Pins: ‘When he installed himself in a new place, Picasso usually did drawings of the area to get his bearings and map out a kind of cosmology for himself. A turning in the road, a stretch of railway track, a view of the sea, telegraph poles: such are the subjects of his sketchbook notations. He also did colourful oil sketches of local villas in which he has fun with their distinctive towers and balustrades.’2 Another scholar has pointed out that ‘In his sketchbooks or on loose sheets, the artist offers us quite literal descriptions of the seascape of Juan-les-Pins and a number of particular aspects of the villa at which he was staying. These works seem to be almost domesticated. Picasso had no compunction in describing his real surroundings, even though he was aware that the true reality of things might be revealed to him at the most unexpected moment.’3

Drawn on the 13th of July 1920, shortly after Picasso and Olga had settled into the Villa des Sables, this drawing may be associated with a handful of pencil landscapes of Juan- les-Pins drawn between July and September 1920. These views of rooftops, trees and neighbouring villas, drawn from a window at the Villa des Sables, include a sheet in the Musée Picasso in Paris4 and several others in private collections5. A number of landscape drawings of rooftops at Juan-les-Pins are also found in a small sketchbook used by Picasso in the summer of 1920, which contains two pencil sketches closely related to the left half of the composition of the present sheet6. A small oil sketch on canvas depicting the same view of a house among gardens and foliage, dated the 28th of July 19207, may also be associated with this drawing. Likewise executed during this fertile summer was a small, decorative painting of houses at Juan-les-Pins, today in the collection of the Musée Picasso in Paris8.

In later visits to the Côte d’Azur in the 1920s and 1930s, Picasso stayed at other rented villas in Juan-les-Pins and Antibes. Indeed, apart from the period of the Second World War, when he remained in Paris, he was to return to the Riviera almost every summer until the end of his life; not only to Antibes and Juan-les-Pins but also Saint-Raphaël, Vallauris, Cannes and Mougins, where he lived from 1961 until his death in 1973. The Cap d’Antibes was ultimately the home of the first museum dedicated to the painter in his lifetime; in 1966 the Château Grimaldi in Antibes, where Picasso had a studio for several months at the end of 1946, was renamed the Musée Picasso, and today contains over two hundred works by the artist.

The present sheet was until recently in the collection of the artist’s granddaughter Marina Ruiz Picasso (b.1951), the only daughter of Picasso’s eldest son Paulo. Though her relationships with both her father and grandfather were troubled, Marina was the only legitimate grandchild of the artist alive at the time of his death in 1973, and therefore received the second-largest inheritance, after that of Picasso’s second wife . As John Richardson has noted, Marina Picasso ‘differs from the artist’s other five heirs in that she has made a point of exhibiting as much as possible of her magnificent collection in a succession of traveling exhibitions…for students of modern art in cities which have never seen a Picasso retrospective, these exhibitions have been a revelation.’9

1. John Richardson, A Life of Picasso. Vol.III: The Triumphant Years 1917-1932, London, 2007, p.160.

2. Ibid., p.162. Four small oil sketches of houses and rooftops at Juan-les-Pins are illustrated in Josep Palau i Fabre, Picasso: From the Ballets to Drama (1917-1926), Cologne, 1999, pp.221-222, nos.803-806.

3. Palau i Fabre, ibid., p.215.

4. Inv. MP 929; Michèle Richet, The Musée Picasso, Paris. Catalogue of the Collections, Vol.II: Drawings, Watercolours, Gouaches, Pastels, London, 1988, p.254, no.806; The Picasso Project, op.cit., p.118, no. 20.380. The drawing is dated August 1920.

5. Christian Zervos, Pablo Picasso. Vol.4: Oeuvres de 1920 à 1922, Paris, 1951, pl.42, no.130 (dated 11 July 1920) and pl.70, no.203 (dated August 1920); Zervos, op.cit., 1975, pl.36, no.85 (dated 12 July 1920) and pl.38, no.90; The Picasso Project, op.cit., p.95, no.20-306, p.97, nos.20-310 and 20-312, and p.118, no.20-379; Jean-Louis Andral et al, M. Pablo’s Holidays: Picasso in Antibes Juan-les-Pins, exhibition catalogue, Antibes, 2018-2019, no.8, illustrated p.23 (dated 15 July 1920).

6. Zervos, ibid., 1951, pl.46, no.142 and pl.47, no.150 (dated 28 September 1920); Arnold Glimcher and Marc Glimcher, ed., Je suis le cahier: The Sketchbooks of Picasso, exhibition catalogue, London, 1986, one illustrated p.320, under No.71; The Picasso Project, op.cit., p.114, no. 20.366 and p.135, no.20-435.

7. Palau i Fabre, op.cit., p.221, no.803; Andral et al, op.cit., no.12, illustrated p.24. The oil sketch, which measures 15 x 24.5 cm. and is dated on the reverse, is in the collection of the artist’s heirs.

8. Inv. MP 68; Zervos, op.cit., 1951, pl.35, no.107; Marie-Laure Besnard-Bernadac et al, Musée Picasso. Catalogue of the Collections, Vol.I: Paintings, Papiers collés, Picture reliefs, Sculptures, Ceramics, London, 1986, p.55, no.63; Palau i Fabre, op.cit., p.214, no.777; The Picasso Project, op.cit., p.109, no.20-349; Carsten-Peter Warncke and Ingo F. Walther, Pablo Picasso 1881-1973, Vol.I, Cologne, 2007, illustrated p.269; Andral et al, op.cit., no.6, illustrated p.13.

9. John Richardson, ‘In Memory of Pablito’, in Santa Fe and Dallas, Gerald Peters Gallery, Picasso on Paper: Selected Works from the Marina Picasso Collection, exhibition catalogue, 1998, unpaginated.