"The day I met Marie-Thérèse, I realized that I had before me what I had always been dreaming about."
—Pablo Picasso

Painted on April 4, 1932, Pablo Picasso’s Figures et plante is a vibrant gem of the artist’s portraits of his reigning muse, Marie-Thérèse. Among Picasso’s finest painterly achievements, the works of this seminal year mark Picasso’s annus mirabilis or “year of wonders,” as described by the artist’s biographer John Richardson, when Marie-Thérèse had claimed her exceptional presence in his art. Having resided in private hands for the last 20 years, Figures et plante reveals an expanded scene of Buste de femme de profil (Femme écrivant) which the artist had painted just three days earlier. In the present work, Picasso unveils the stage from left to right: Marie-Thérèse writing at a table in the Château de Boisgeloup near Gisors, which the artist had purchased in the summer of 1930 and where the lovers often met in secret. Beside her, he renders a second seated figure overarched by foliage sprouting from a vase that reflects the bright light streaming into the room. 

 

Picasso met Marie-Thérèse in front of the Galeries Lafayette in Paris in January 1927, when he was still married to Olga Khokhlova. “I was an innocent young girl. I knew nothing—either of life or of Picasso,” Walter recalled years later. “He simply grabbed me by the arm and said, ‘I am Picasso! You and I are going to do great things together.’”ⁱ This coup de foudre soon blossomed into a rapturous affair and would shape the course of Picasso’s art by the turn of the decade. By the time Picasso created Figures et plante, her distinctive image had proliferated through every medium of his work. As Françoise Gilot, Picasso’s final lover, later observed, “With her, Pablo could throw off his intellectual life and follow his instinct...I could see that she was certainly the woman who had inspired Pablo plastically more than any other.”ⁱⁱ

 

"All of [my paintings] are researches. I search incessantly and there is a logical sequence in all this research…It’s an experiment in time."
—Pablo Picasso

While some have interpreted the figure on the left as Marie-Thérèse’s sister (presumably in light of Picasso’s later 1934 series of the two women reading at a table), it can also be read as a double portrait of Marie-Thérèse. For the left figure, Picasso incorporates the signifying Marie-Thérèse motifs he had explored in the months leading up to Figures et plante: the philodendron seen in Femme nue, feuilles et buste (Marie-Thérèse), the lavender-yellow pairing he iconically ascribed to Marie-Thérèse, and the mirror—here suggestively doubling as the circular vase. In the present work, he frames the fronds directly over the secondary figure and also shines the yellow light from the window upon her, completing the chromatic symbolism that defines Marie-Thérèse in some of his most renowned works from the period.

 

More cogently, it appears that Picasso treated the additional figure in Figures et plante similarly to that of Marie-Thérèse’s mirrored reflection in his renowned Jeune fille devant au miroir (Marie-Thérèse), The Museum of Modern Art, New York, created less than a month before: the same green, blue, and black of her sinuous hair, her body marked with the same bold red accent. It is therefore not unlikely that Picasso may have been aiming to fuse his investigations in Jeune fille devant au miroir, and Buste de femme de profil in the present work—after all, Picasso “preferred [Jeune fille devant au miroir ] to any of the others in the long series he had completed that spring,” as Alfred Barr noted.ⁱⁱⁱ

 

Picasso’s employment of the window to frame his figures and his use of contrasting colors to model light nods to the work of Henri Matisse, who had first embraced these devices in his Fauvist years. Indeed, their now well-known symbiotic rivalry was at a peak during this period, as Picasso was preparing for his historic June 1932 retrospective at the Galerie Georges Petit, where Matisse had his own retrospective just the year before. Yet, as John Elderfield observed, “Picasso’s Matissean paintings of the early 1930s are even more unusual in that they resemble not only earlier paintings by Matisse but, especially, the paintings that Matisse would make in response to them.”^iv The present work formidably manifests this reflexive dialogue, particularly with Matisse’s canvases of 1938, such as The Conservatory, when the French artist would first explore the philodendron motif that first held Picasso’s interest in the 1932 paintings.

 

Conjuring the place of its very creation, Figures et plante is imbued with the space and light Picasso found in Boisgeloup, literally and metaphorically. It was the perfect sanctuary not only for the artist and his muse, but also for his artistic investigations that resulted in some of the most celebrated works of his oeuvre. The freedom he found there translated into his painterly sensibility as he opened up his handling and palette, and explored new themes towards a more Surrealist expression embodied in the present work. Indeed with all its allusions and complexities, Figures et plante ultimately captures Picasso’s telling words. “The work one does is a way of keeping one's diary.”^v 

 

ⁱ Marie-Thérèse Walter, quoted in Pierre Daix, Picasso: Life and Art, trans. Olivia Emmet, New York, 1993, p. 202.
ⁱⁱ Françoise Gilot and Carlton Lake, Life with Picasso, New York, 1964, pp. 235, 241.
ⁱⁱⁱ Alfred Barr, Picasso: Forty Years of His Art, exh. cat., Museum of Modern Art, New York, no. 246, p. 156.
^iv John Elderfield, in Matisse Picasso, exh. cat., Tate, London, 2002, p. 233.
^v Pablo Picasso, in Tériade, “En causant avec Picasso,” L’Intransigeant, June 15, 1932, p. 1.