Pablo Picasso

PABLO PICASSO (Malaga, 1881 - Mougins, France, 1973).
"La sirene definitive", ca. 1907.
Ink drawing on paper.
Signed.
Measurements: 19 x 13 cm; 43 x 37 cm (frame).

These four original drawings by Picasso, signed and sheltered under the French title "La sirene definitive" are magnificent sketches in which the genius from Malaga seems to have found his "definitive image" as far as the mythological character is concerned: a female bust with her face in profile and her breast reduced to a circle, her hair blown by the wind and her wings folded. Its referent is Homer, who describes mermaids as birds with the face of a woman. The linear and agile style of Picasso's drawings is inimitable. They give the impression of being made with a single stroke, without lifting the pen or pencil from the paper. The hieratic postures of the effigies and the performance of a unilinear stroke are identical to those of a mermaid drawing dated 1907, which appeared on the back of a Montmartre business card. The drawing was a gift from Picasso to Guillaume Apollinaire, his close friend who had asked him to illustrate his first published collection of poems, "Le Bestiaire ou Cortège d'Orphée". For this bestiary, Picasso made numerous unilinear drawings such as the one in question. These mermaids are virtuoso examples of the unilinear graphic style that Picasso was developing in those years. His pen moves fluidly in a single, uninterrupted line, never leaving the surface of the paper, as if drawing in space, to achieve a pure and lyrical figurative clarity. Apollinaire proposed him to make woodcut illustrations, and they even made a chick and an eagle, but the project was interrupted because Picasso was absorbed by his work "Les demoiselles d'Avignon". In the end, Apollinaire would have to use Raoul Dufy's woodcuts.

"La Sirène Définitive" is also part of Picasso's interest in reinventing classical myths with his unmistakable graphic language, fusing feminine sensuality with a disturbing and powerful symbolism.

Creator of cubism along with Braque, Picasso was a turning point in the history of art. He began his studies in 1895, at the Provincial School of Fine Arts in Barcelona, and only two years later he had his first individual exhibition, at the café "Els Quatre Gats". After several short stays in Paris, Picasso settled permanently in the French capital in 1904. After his blue and pink periods, developed in the early years of the century, the painter began his geometrical experiments in 1906, during a stay in Lleida. A year later he began to paint "Las señoritas de la calle Avinyó", and in 1909 he came into contact with Braque and began his cubist period. During the second decade he developed his classical period, and created his famous sets for Diaghilev's Russian ballets. In 1936 he was appointed director of the Prado Museum by the Government of the Spanish Republic, and a year later he painted "Guernica". The definitive international recognition will come in 1939, as a result of the retrospective dedicated to him by the MOMA in New York. During the following decades, anthological exhibitions will be dedicated to him all over the world, in Rome, Milan, Paris, Cologne and New York, among many other cities. He is represented in the most important museums around the world, such as the Metropolitan, the MOMA and the Guggenheim in New York, the Hermitage in St. Petersburg, the National Gallery in London or the Reina Sofia in Madrid.