Picasso, Pablo (1881-1973)
Femme à la montre (Woman with a watch)
1932
Oil on canvas, 130 x 97 cm
Private collection
signed Picasso (upper left); inscribed Boisgeloup and dated 17 Août XXXII. (on the stretcher)
“There is no doubt that 1932 marks the peak of fever pitch intensity and achievement, a year of rapturous masterpieces that reach a new and unfamiliar summit in both his painting and sculpture.” -William Rubin in Exh. Cat., New York The Museum of Modern Art, Picasso and Portraiture: Representation and Transformation, 1996, p. 361.
Among the representations of ardor and desire in the canon of twentieth-century art, Picasso’s sensuous depictions of his lover and muse Marie-Thérèse Walter reign supreme. Executed in 1932 at the pinnacle of Picasso’s impassioned affair, Femme à la montre exists as one of the most resolved and complex depictions from this highly charged year.
The rapturous period from which Femme à la montre originates has been described by the artist’s biographer John Richardson as Picasso’s annus mirabilis or ‘year of wonders.’ In 1932, Picasso worked at a feverish pace, ceaselessly inspired by his new muse’s presence and the longing felt in her absence. Utterly consumed by his amour fou—the Surrealist notion of an obsessional, vortex-like desire—each work from this period reads like an entry in a diary, documenting the pair’s evolving relationship. Among the artist’s 1932 works, it is the monumental canvases like Femme à la montre, which unapologetically announce Marie-Thérèse’s presence, that are most widely acclaimed for their singular importance in Picasso‘s oeuvre.
Cecil Beaton, Pablo Picasso, Rue la Boétie, 1933. Photo © The Cecil Beaton Studio Archive at Sotheby’s. Art © 2023 Estate of Pablo Picasso / Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York.
At the same time, the occasion of Picasso’s fiftieth birthday in October 1931 had stirred something within the artist as he confronted his own legacy. Though Picasso was widely regarded as one of the greatest painters of the day, his closest artistic rival Henri Matisse had garnered wide acclaim in the 1920s for his ornate Odalisques, while Picasso‘s own work, which vacillated between latent Cubist and Neoclassical idioms, had at times confounded critics. Furthermore, the sweeping Matisse retrospectives, first at Galeries Georges Petit in 1931, and later that year at New York‘s Museum of Modern Art (the institution’s first ever monographic exhibition) proved a sort of gauntlet thrown down for Picasso. Some questioned whether the celebrated Father of Cubism would soon be relegated to the past. It was in this pivotal moment in Picasso‘s career that Femme à la montre was created.
The previous two decades had witnessed the artist rising from the bohemian ranks of Montmartre to a tony studio on rue La Boétie, with his marriage to Russian ballerina Olga Khokhlova in 1918 only adding to his bourgeois presentation. Behind the façade, however, Picasso had grown restless in his work and marriage. In 1927, a chance encounter outside the Galeries Lafeyette with the seventeen-year-old Marie-Thérèse Walter set in motion one of the greatest love affairs of Picasso’s life. Taken at once with the young woman, Picasso approached Marie-Thérèse, stating “I am Picasso! You and I are going to do great things together’” (Marie-Thérèse quoted in Exh. Cat., Los Angeles County Museum of Art, Picasso and the Weeping Women, 1994, p. 143). Shortly thereafter, the two embarked upon an affair which would define a decade of the artist’s production.
Picasso’s infatuation took on near-mythic proportions, the likeness of Marie-Thérèse spilling out onto canvas after canvas, in sculpture and on paper. Due to the age difference and Picasso’s marriage to Olga, their relationship remained a secret and was hidden even from the artist’s innermost circle of friends. As a result, Marie-Thérèse’s identity is hidden in Picasso’s earliest works, obscured by his Surreal biomorphic interpretations, hinted at in shadowy profiles or tantalizingly suggested in the still lifes which conceal the initials ‘MT.’ As Françoise Gilot would later write, Marie-Thérèse was “the luminous dream of youth, always in the background but always within reach, that nourished his work… Marie-Thérèse, then, was very important to him as long as he was living with Olga because she was the dream when the reality was someone else” (quoted in Exh. Cat., London, Tate, Picasso 1932 – Love, Fame, Tragedy, 2018, p. 18).
Their furtive liaison resulted in scores of coded images of his lover, eventually culminating in the undeniably bold and sensuous portraits of 1932 at the apex of their relationship. His muse’s potent mix of physical appeal and sexual naïveté had an intoxicating effect on Picasso, and his rapturous desire for the young woman brought about a wealth of images that have been praised as the most erotic and emotionally uplifting compositions of his long career. Augmented by the forbidden nature of their years-long relationship, Picasso’s unleashed passion is nowhere more apparent than in his 1932 depictions of his muse.
“…My dear MT… I love you more than the taste of your mouth, more than your look, more than your hands, more than your whole body, more and more and more and more than all my love for you will ever be able to love.” –Pablo Picasso in a letter to Marie-Thérèse Walter, quoted in Exh. Cat., Vancouver Art Gallery, Picasso: The Artist and His Muses, 2016, p. 73. (Sotheby’s)
See also:
• Walter, Marie-Thérèse (1909-1977)