Roland Salazar Rose Sold at Auction Prices

Pablo Picasso (1881-1973)

Le voyeur signed and dated 'Picasso Cannes 1er ao–t 33' (lower right) pen and India ink, brush and grey wash on paper 15 7/8 x 19 7/8in. (40.2 x 50.5cm.) Executed on 1 August 1933 in Cannes PROVENANCE Eric Alport, Oxford. Richard Buckle, London. Lambeth Arts Limited, London. Private Collection, Japan. NOTES This work is sold with a photo-certificate from Maya Widmaier Picasso dated Paris le 30 mars de l'An 2002. Leaning over a balcony like a subversive Romeo, a young man steals a glimpse of a beautiful sleeping woman under a starlit sky. Dating from 1933, Le voyeur condenses Picasso''s love and lust for his young lover Marie-Th‚rŠse Walter, whose distinctive characteristics are clearly discernable in the woman, into a lyrical and tender image redolent with mythology and romance. Le voyeur dates from one of the most intensely productive and inspired periods of Picasso''s career, when he began to discard many of the constraints of Classical style while adapting the subject matter to his own personal agenda, producing sensuous, curvaceous images of Marie-Th‚rŠse, like his 1932 masterpiece, Le Rˆve (Private Collection). According to the most recent biographical readings of this phase in the master's art (see R. Rosenblum, 'Picasso's Blond Muse: The Reign of Marie-Th‚rŠse Walter', in Picasso and Portraiture, New York, 1996, pp. 337-383), Marie-Th‚rŠse's smooth, unblemished features, the imperturbable classical perfections of eyebrow, nose and cheek, were at the core of Picasso's new Olympian inspiration of the late 1920s-early 1930s. The adolescent lover, the hidden passion of years, the mother of Maya, was to become, in Picasso's art, the Sleeping Beauty. The most intense portraits of Marie-Th‚rŠse are stolen while she languidly sleeps, her head perfectly still, her hair sensuously loose and her arms harmoniously framing the beautiful oval of her profile. They attain a musical synthesis of oppositions: contrasting intensities of light and darkness, the duality of a profile imposed upon a frontal view - as metaphores for the 'endless variations on the dialogue between external and internal aspects of the human mind and body, such as wakefulness versus sleep, or conscious repression versus sexual release' ( ibid., p. 340). From 1927 (or even as early as 1925), when Marie-Th‚rŠse made her appearance in the artist's life, to 1930, when Picasso installed her at 44, rue de la Bo‚tie, the iconography of the young woman in the artist's work changed dramatically. She slowly emerged '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. At times her master seems to worship humbly at her shrine, capturing a fixed, confrontational stare of almost supernatural power; but more often, he becomes an ecstatic voyeur, who quietly captures his beloved reading, meditating, catnapping, or surrendering to the deepest abandon of sleep' ( ibid. ). In this work, the aspect of romantic voyeurism finds one of its purest and most poetic interpretations.