GALERIE DE L’INSTITUT

Literature
– ZERVOS, Christian, Pablo Picasso, œuvres de 1932 à 1937, Paris, éditions Cahiers d’Art, vol.VIII, p.50, n°116.
– GOLDING, John; PENROSE, Roland, Picasso in Retrospect, New York, 1973, n° 181, repr. p.108.
– LEAL, Brigitte ; BERNADAC, Marie-Laure ; PIOT, Christine, Picasso, La Monographie 1881-1973, Paris, 2000, repr. p.684.
– MCCULLY, M.; RAEBURN, M.; ANDRAL, J.-L., Picasso: Cote d’Azur, cat. exp., Forum Grimaldi, Monaco, 2013, n°45, repr. p.111.
PALAU I FABRE, Josep, Picasso. From the Minotaur to Guernica (1927-1939), Barcelone, Ediciones Polígrafa, 2011, p.158, n°494.
WEISNER, Ulrich, Picassos Surrealismus, Werke 1925-1937, cat. exp., Kunsthalle Bielefeld, 1991, repr. p.335.​

Picasso spent the summer of 1933 with his family in Cannes, at the Hôtel Majestic, and then in Barcelona. Marie-Thérèse, for her part, was in Biarritz, far from him; she became an obsessive thought that imprinted itself everywhere in a variety of forms.

The composition presented here, dated 15 July 1933, is a magnificent synthesis of the different facets that shaped Picasso’s work at the time. It forms part of a group of works on paper, closely related in spirit, executed in Cannes. They share the same dreamlike tonality, set against a backdrop of antiquity and the Mediterranean, in a palette of ochres—pinks, browns and reds—and blues.

Marie-Thérèse is ever-present, alongside other themes that she also embodies, such as sculpture and the artist with their model.

In this respect, these works from the summer of 1933 extend, both stylistically and thematically, the prints from the Vollard Suite depicting the sculptor’s studio, which Picasso composed in the spring of 1933 (from March to May).