Pablo Picasso, Le corsage à carreaux
Right from the start, Pablo Picasso declared himself the ‘king’, stating without false modesty that he was the heir to the first great painter of the Spanish tradition: El Greco. Despite his boundless ego, perhaps not even he would have imagined that he could become the undisputed icon of twentieth-century art. Picasso left behind an immense body of work comprising more than sixteen thousand pieces, many conceived in accordance with his distinctive creative style, detached from reality, featuring figures distorted through ceaseless transformations.
With this lithograph by Picasso, the exhibition reaches its ideal chronological and conceptual culmination. The work depicts Françoise Gilot, a young painter and the artist’s partner at the time, and is a masterful testament to how Picasso transformed the portrait of a woman into a realm of pure and free formal experimentation. The figure emerges from a deep and dense background of darkness.
At the centre, the woman’s face dominates, framed by a thick mass of hair. Her features no longer conform to the rules of traditional perspective or academic chiaroscuro: Picasso breaks down and reassembles her facial features, elongating the line of the nose so that it merges with the brow ridge and widening the eyes. The gaze, direct and magnetic, possesses a hieratic solemnity that evokes the formal purity of primitive masks, devoid of any purely anecdotal or sentimental intent. The lower part of the portrait features the geometric motif that gives the work its title: the chequered corset.
Picasso’s work represents the culmination of an epoch-making metamorphosis. Our journey began with the romantic grace of Hayez and the fluid sensuality of Boldini’s Belle Époque. Now, with Picasso, the female universe ceases once and for all to be an object to be described or idealised. The woman herself becomes the driving force behind stylistic change, a proud, enigmatic and impenetrable icon who does not submit to the observer’s gaze, but challenges it.