Pablo Picasso
Bust of a Seated Woman1938

On view:

Broad Contemporary Art Museum, floor 3

Cubist oil painting portrait of a seated figure in near-monochrome grays, with a hatted, swirling abstracted face and striped torso, signed and dated upper left

Reverse of a framed canvas showing wooden stretcher bars with corner keys, linen backing, and several handwritten and printed provenance labels in French attached to the frame and upper edge.

Artist or Maker: Pablo Picasso
Spain, 1881-1973, active France
Title: Bust of a Seated Woman
Place Made: France
Date Made: 1938
Medium: Oil on canvas
Dimensions: 25 5/8 × 19 1/2 in. (65.09 × 49.53 cm)
Credit Line: Partial, fractional and promised gift of Janice and Henri Lazarof
Accession Number: M.2005.70.104
Classification: Paintings
Collecting Area: Modern Art
Curatorial Notes: During the late 1930s, three of Picasso’s romantic relationships overlapped. He had been married to Olga Khokhlova, a Ukrainian ballet dancer, since 1918 and involved with Marie-Thérèse Walter since 1927. In 1935, while Walter was pregnant with their daughter, Maya, Picasso began an affair with Surrealist photographer and painter Dora Maar. He painted dozens of portraits of these women, each with their own set of coded characteristics. About his abusive treat- ment of women, Picasso’s and Khokhlova’s granddaughter Marina wrote: “He submitted them to his animal sexuality, tamed them, bewitched them, ingested them, and crushed them onto his canvas. . . once they were bled dry, he would dispose of them.”

Picasso frequently pictured Maar in distress, often isolated in a small room, as in Bust of a Seated Woman and Bust of a Woman (Dora Maar), to the right; he once claimed he could only ever imagine her crying, as he depicted her in Weeping Woman with Handkerchief (on view nearby). Maar resented this portrayal, asserting that “All [Picasso’s] portraits of me are lies. . . . Not one is Dora Maar.”

Wall label, 2021.
Provenance: Studio of the artist (1881-1973). [Suzanne Feigl, Galerie d'Art Moderne, Basel]; Baron Yves Lambert (1928-1987), Brussels, Belgium; [sale, Christie's New York, May 12, 1987, Lot 15]; Private Collection; [Acquavella Contemporary Art, New York]; sold in 2004 to Janice and Henri Lazarof, Los Angeles; given in 2005 to LACMA.
Selected Bibliography: The Picasso Project. "Picasso's Paintings, Watercolors, Drawings and Sculpture." San Francisco: Alan Wofsy Fine Arts, 1995
Zervos, Christian. Pablo Picasso. Paris: Cahiers d'art.
Barron, Stephanie. Envisioning Modernism: The Janice and Henri Lazarof Collection. Los Angeles: Los Angeles County Museum of Art; Munich; New York: DelMonico Books-Prestel, 2012.

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