Property from The Stella Collection
Pablo Picasso (1881-1973)
Femme accroupie en costume turc (Jacqueline)
oil on canvas
36 ¼ x 28 ¾ in. (92 x 73 cm.)
Painted in 1955
Estimate: $20 million – $30 million
\This November, Christie’s New York will offer Pablo Picasso’s Femme accroupie en costume turc (Jacqueline), 1955 (estimate: $20 million - $30 million), a masterpiece that has remained in a private and important collection of a single family for three generations, since 1957 – just two years after its creation. The work was originally purchased by a collector who developed personal relationships with leading contemporary artists starting in the 1950s. The collection includes works by Picasso, Joan Miró, Marc Chagall, Henri Matisse, Georges Braque and Max Ernst, among others, which were acquired either directly from the artists or through the preeminent gallerists of the time such as Daniel-Henry Kahnweiler and Galerie Maeght, and subsequently kept in the same family for three generations.
Picasso’s powerful portrait depicts Jacqueline Roque, the final great love and muse of the artist’s life. It is among the most radical depictions from an important series of eleven seated portraits of Jacqueline that developed out of Picasso’s landmark series, Les femmes d’Alger (based on the eponymous Delacroix masterpiece), considered his single greatest achievement after World War II. Here Picasso honed in on the frontal, seated figure that emerged in the culminating Femme d’Alger works. Clearly in awe of his striking new muse, he has transformed her into a majestically seated odalisque, rendered in an elaborate combination of lines, patterns, and jewel-like color. In a nod to his friend and rival Henri Matisse, who had passed away just one year prior in 1954, Picasso approaches the canvas with a distinctly Matissean style, employing costume and decoration as a way of evoking the seductive fantasy of Orientalism, and using pattern as a way to experiment with pictorial construction.
Vanessa Fusco, Senior Specialist and Co-Head of 20th Century Art Evening Sale comments, The Stella Collection was assembled by a passionate and knowledgeable collector, whose relationship with the artists and their primary dealers of the time meant that he was able to acquire exceptional examples of their work. Leading the collection is Picasso’s Femme accroupie en costume turc (Jacqueline), a strikingly modern treatment of the seated figure developed out of the artist’s seminal series Les femmes d’Alger, in dialogue with Delacroix. The painting was lent by the family to the artist’s seminal 1957 exhibition at The Museum of Modern Art in New York on the occasion of Picasso’s 75th birthday, and it is an honor to bring it back to into the public realm so many decades later.
Femme accroupie en costume turc (Jacqueline) was painted in Picasso’s new home, the spacious nineteenth-century villa known as La Californie, which overlooked Cannes. At this time, Picasso’s fame was such that he had could not move through Paris without drawing crowds. Picasso first met Jacqueline in 1952. At the time, he was still living with Françoise Gilot; Jacqueline was working as a sales assistant at a ceramics studio at which he would frequently work. By 1954, Picasso’s relationship with Françoise had ended and the two were a couple. They would remain together until the artist’s death at age 91.
Keith Gill, Head of Impressionist and Modern Art, Christie’s London: “Created just a year after the first Impressionist Exhibition introduced the public to the artist’s revolutionary plein-air aesthetic and modern subject matter, Au jardin, la famille de l’artiste dates from a key moment in Monet’s career. Offering an intimate glimpse into the quiet routines of his family life, the work is filled with vibrant colour and golden sunlight, and contains all the hallmarks of the artist’s classic Impressionist style. It is an honor to present Au jardin, la famille de l’artiste this November in our 20th Century Evening Sale in New York.”
Filled with the warm glow of summer sunshine and the vibrant hues of flowers in full bloom, Au Jardin, la famille de l’artiste is a romantic portrait of the artist’s family, glimpsed in a private moment as they enjoy the calm, tranquil atmosphere of their garden. At the time the work was created, Monet was living in Argenteuil, a lively suburb of Paris, located on the right bank of the Seine just eleven kilometres west of the capital. As with many of the artist’s paintings from 1875, Au Jardin, la famille de l’artiste eschews any details that suggest the rapidly changing character of the town at this time. Instead, the composition restricts its view, focusing on the lush abundance of the intimate space of Monet’s garden, allowing the artist to portray Argenteuil purely as a place of comfort, leisure and peace.
The idyllic scene in Au Jardin, la famille de l’artiste captures a sense of the peaceful rhythms that marked Monet’s days during this period. The artist’s wife, Camille, and eldest son Jean, are depicted along with another female figure as they enjoy a leisurely afternoon in the resplendent, well-manicured gardens of their second home in the town. The figures almost disappear amidst the foliage surrounding them, from the tall, towering screen of trees that mark the edge of the garden, to the luscious blooms of the roses, geraniums, and gladioli that fill the carefully cultivated flower beds. Through the briefest of brushstrokes, Monet captures the essential characteristics of each of the different species of flowers that populate the garden, revealing his own keen interest in horticulture and gardening, which would reach its apogee in his famed gardens at Giverny.
Au Jardin, la famille de l’artiste has been a highlight of a number of prestigious Impressionist collections since the year it was painted. The painting was purchased directly from the artist shortly after it was completed in 1875 by the renowned French baritone Jean-Baptiste Faure, who was an avid early collector of Monet’s work, acquiring over fifty compositions from the artist during the 1870s. Au Jardin, la famille de l’artiste remained in Faure’s collection for over three decades, before selling to Durand-Ruel in 1907, who lent the painting to a number of important early exhibitions of Impressionist art in Germany during the first decade of the 20th Century. The painting was then purchased from Durand-Ruel by the wealthy banker and industrialist, Baron Mór Lipót Herzog in 1911. Herzog was a voracious collector, with interests spanning all eras of art history; his huge collection included Gothic objets d’art, paintings from the Early Renaissance and the Dutch Golden Age, as well as a rich grouping of works by Monet, Renoir, Manet, Cézanne and Gauguin, which hung in the family palace in Budapest. Au jardin, la famille de l’artiste was subsequently acquired by the pre-eminent German collectors Kurt and Harriet Hirschland in 1928, and was among the artworks brought by the family to New York when they were forced to flee Europe in the late-1930s. The painting remained in the Hirschland collection until the mid-1960s, when it passed into the possession of Mr & Mrs David Bakalar of Boston, with whom it remained for a further two decades before being auctioned in their single owner collection sale in 1984, where it was acquired by the present owners.