Femme au Fauteuil, II: Dora Maar is a combination of sugar-lift aquatint, scraper, burin and drypoint by Pablo Picasso. The plate was created in 1939 and an edition of fifty-four, comprised of unsigned proofs, was printed by Jacques Frelaut at Atelier Lacourière-Frelaut in April 1942. This impression is pencil signed and dated “Paris le 28 Avril 1942” beneath the signature and pencil dedicated “Pour Frelaut” above the signature. This is a rare signed proof printed by Frelaut on ivory Montval laid paper with the Picasso watermark. The references are Block 318 and Baer 649 II B a. The platemark measures 11-3/4 x 9-3/8 inches.
Picasso executed this intaglio not long after the Suite Vollard was completed, and it features his use of multiple techniques learned under the guidance of Roger Lacourière as he worked on the Suite Vollard. Here, he has rendered a portrait of his lover, Dora Maar, seated in an armchair. This work predates the Femme assise, robe blue and Tete de femme au chapeau paintings from the same year, and retains the vestiges of his exploration of neo-classical themes found in the Suite Vollard. Picasso’s portraits of Maar would famously become a kind of mirror of his emotions during the turbulent yeas of the Spanish Civil War and World War II. Not long after this soft and contemplative image was created, his images of Maar became fractal and sharp, reflecting Picasso’s wartime anxieties.
Pablo Picasso, painter, sculptor, printmaker, and ceramist, was born in coastal Malaga, Spain, on October 25, 1881. Picasso’s mother, Maria Picasso Lopez, recognized her son’s talent and encouraged his pursuit of art. She arranged for Don Jose Ruiz y Blasco, an artist and art professor, to teach Picasso drawing and painting from an early age. He also studied under his father before attending La Llotja Art Institute and he was later sent to the Royal Academy of San Fernando in Madrid. Picasso was not an academician and preferred studying paintings at the Prado. The young artist experimented with different techniques and mediums, including printmaking, and produced his first etching in 1899.
Picasso visited Paris for the first time in 1900 where he met French writer Max Jacob. The following year Picasso moved to Paris where he and Jacob shared a small studio. In 1904, Picasso began experimenting with printmaking once again, creating the Saltimbanque Suite of fifteen intaglios. These languished several years until his art dealer, Ambroise Vollard, took notice of them and published them in an edition of 250.
Picasso soon became attached to the circle of intellectuals, artists, and
writers led by Gertrude Stein. This brought him into contact with key people in
the art world, including Henri Matisse and Georges Braque. Together Picasso and
Braque established one of art history's most famed genres, Cubism. Among Picasso’s
Cubist subgenres were "analytic cubism" and "synthetic cubism,"
both investigations of art executed through forms of deconstruction.
Exempted from conscription into the First World War due to his Spanish
citizenship, Picasso continued to work in Avignon and traveled for the first
time to Italy, where he found inspiration in the figurative antiquities of Rome
and Greece. In the early 1920s his work largely departed from Cubism and he produced
figurative compositions in formal or neoclassical poses.
In 1931, Picasso’s interest in intaglio printmaking was revived when publisher
Ambroise Vollard invited him to create a suite of 100 etchings. This endeavor would
prove to be a boon of experience for Picasso, working at first alone and then,
in 1934, with master printmaker Roger Lacourière who introduced him to new
techniques, such as sugar-lift. The images were created in a neoclassical style,
meditating on themes of love, war, old age and youth. La Suite Vollard became Picasso’s most
famous collection of printed works. Picasso finished the plates in 1937 and
handed them over for printing to Lacourière but Vollard would not live to see
their publication. With the onset of World War II, Picasso was unable to obtain
plates and other materials, and his printmaking pursuit was put on hold. He created
over 1,400 etchings, lithographs, and blockprints throughout his career,
working with leading experimental printmaker Stanley William Hayter, Atelier
Mourlot, Hidalgo Arnéra, and the Crommelnyck brothers.
Picasso remained in Paris, harassed by the occupying Gestapo forces for his “degenerate” art but never arrested. He continued to paint and to illegally produce cast bronze sculptures with the help of the French Resistance. With the liberation of Paris in 1944 his reputation had not dissipated. He began to exhibit almost immediately and he would continue to live and work in Mougins, France, until his death on April 8, 1973.
Picasso is undoubtedly one of the most
influential artists of the 20th century. According to Konstantin Bazarov, he
has often been compared with Stravinsky as one of the great chameleons of his
time, each reacting to the crisis of expression in modern art by constantly
exploring, thus passing through a whole series of phases of creative activity.
