Picasso, Pablo (1881-1973)
Pierrot et danseuse, La Danseuse bleue (Pierrot and dancer, The Blue Dancer)
1900
Oil on canvas, 38.4 x 46 cm
Private collection
Pierrot et danseuse (La Danseuse bleue) is one of the very few oils that Picasso completed on his first trip to Paris in the last months of 1900. Working as an artist and illustrator in Madrid, Picasso realized that he needed to establish a foothold in the Parisian art world in order to advance his career; he arrived in Paris in September 1900 with his friend Carlos Casagemas and stayed for three months. During this time he visited the Louvre and the Luxembourg and made the rounds of the commercial galleries including Durand-Ruel, Bernheim-Jeune and Ambroise Vollard. Picasso was attracted to the works of contemporary illustrators such as Toulouse-Lautrec, who captured the excitement of the city in his swiftly executed drawings of the cabaret. Picasso attended the Universal Exhibition several times during the weeks it was on view, first to see his own work, which he criticized for being hung too high, and then returned to see the paintings of David, Corot and Manet. The first works Picasso sold in Paris were handled through Pere Mañach and Berthe Weill. Mañach introduced Picasso to Emmanuel Virenque, who purchased Pierrot et danseuse (La Danseuse bleue) shortly after its creation. Virenque, the Spanish Consul in Paris, would, the following year, go on to purchase Au Moulin Rouge (Le Divan japonais). Of the six oils Picasso created during his first visit to Paris, only La Danseuse bleue (Pierrot et danseuse) and Le Moulin de la Galette (Zervos, vol. I, no. 41; Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York) depicted the excitement of the French capital’s nightlife.
For the nineteen year old Picasso, the bars, cafes and cabarets of Paris, which provided a stage for theatrical performances, dance and song, proved irresistible. “Picasso‘s interest in the theater as a source of paintable subject,” art historian Douglas Cooper states, “showed itself early: to be exact, in a group of paintings executed in Barcelona, Paris and Madrid between the ages of eighteen and twenty…. Picasso seems to have enjoyed the spectacle, whatever it was, for its own sake and to have relished the gay, excited atmosphere of these places of public entertainment, where he gained many insights into human nature and could find relief from the drabness of his own impoverished existence. Nevertheless, Picasso was no mere passive observer we can see from the liveliness, the intensity and the acute observation of the movements and facial expressions of the performers, which characterize these works” (D. Cooper, Op. cit., pp. 13-14).
In this particular canvas, two of the beloved characters from the Commedia dell’Arte interact on the stage – the sad clown Pierrot and his unfaithful wife Columbine, who preferred the company of the Harlequin. Scenes from the Commedia dell’Arte were perennial favorites for European artists since the mid-1500s. Antoine Watteau, Georges Seurat and Paul Cézanne sensitively rendered these characters in a variety of styles, while Picasso himself would use particular figures from the Commedia throughout his career from Rose period imagery to a more cubist Harlequin of 1909 and various iterations in the decades that followed. Like his references to Mythology, theatrical interpretation from the Commedia dell’Arte to Ubu Roi would emerge in new stylistic endeavors. Pierrot et danseuse (La Danseuse bleue) is one of the first and most dazzling of his Commedia dell’Arte scenes. (Sotheby’s)