Picasso’s shift in style in this painting reflects not only his interest in the Renaissance and Neoclassical paintings by Jean-Auguste-Dominique Ingres, but also Impressionist Pierre-Auguste Renoir, whose work Picasso acquired around this time. During the 1920s, many artists in France shared a “return to order,” in which artists rejected the avant-garde tendencies of the prewar years in favor of more traditional approaches to art making. For Picasso, newly married to Russian ballet dancer Olga Khokhlova, portraits of her and their first child, Paulo, reveal a familial stability, tenderness, and intimacy quite different from his Cubism of a decade earlier.
However, by the summer of 1922 their relationship was foundering, and during the following summer the family spent time in the south of France with the family of American expatriates, painter Gerald Murphy and his wife, Sara Wiborg Murphy. Picasso painted Sara on several occasions, and her features share characteristics with Woman with Blue Veil. Picasso included this painting in his first retrospective in 1932, which was exhibited in Paris and at the Zurich Kunsthaus.
Wall label, 2021.
