We are grateful to Charles Stuckey, art historian and former curator of French Painting, National Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C. and 20th Century Painting and Sculpture, Art Institute of Chicago, for his expertise and assistance with the research of this work.

 

Broadly speaking Deux personnages belongs to an extensive body of black and white paintings
made by Pablo Picasso throughout his long career, including some of his most ambitious canvases—for example, Guernica, 1937, Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofía. In consideration of the emphasis on line and shading in them, there are important parallels between this impressive group of works and Picasso’s remarkable accomplishments as a draftsman and printmaker. Indeed, like many of Picasso’s black and white paintings, Deux personnages could be understood as a painting taking shape in terms of drawing.

 

Specifically speaking Deux personnages is the first oil on canvas from a group of eight closely interrelated works made on successive days between Thursday, September 21 and Tuesday, September 26, 1939: four works on paper rendered in ink and/or gouache; three canvases (of which Deux personnages is the earliest and the only one with a signature); and finally a slightly larger oil on canvas, now in somber colors reminiscent of works from Picasso’s early so‐called Blue Period. All eight of these works show the empty corner of a room with two female figures side by side, presumably posing, the one on the right seated and the one on the left standing, a nude in all but the first two versions. Aside from the final oil, in terms of graphic style the figures are rendered simply and somewhat crudely, perhaps referring to art made by children, with the sort of distorted faces and anatomies common in his works from the late 1930s.

 

This group of works is among Picasso’s first attempts to make art after his arrival in the Atlantic
coast town of Royan, having hastily evacuated Paris with his mistress Dora Maar—but with little
in the way of art supplies, as soon as France declared war on Germany on September 3. With their safety in mind, Picasso had already installed Marie‐Thérèse Walter and their daughter Maya at a villa in Royan earlier that summer, far removed at the time from the threat of attack. He and Maar stayed in a hotel and he rented an extra room at the villa as a makeshift studio where he went every day.

 

Since Picasso often confided, already by 1932, how he considered his artworks to be a visual diary of his life, and so dated everything that he made precisely to the day, it seems likely that the figures in these eight images of two women together in some way represent his rival lovers. Compared with Picasso’s numerous images of Maar, she can be identified as both the seated and standing figures in most of the eight two women images made by Picasso towards the end of September 1939. But the figures in Deux personnages are different than the others: with what looks a bit like a beret on her head, the seated woman in Deux personnages should probably be identified with Walter, who had often appeared seated this way in Picasso’s art throughout the 1930s. She is even accompanied by a standing nude in a drawing dated October 10, 1938. 

 

"Painting is just another way of keeping a diary."
— Pablo Picasso

The identity of the standing figure in Deux personnages is less apparent. Her wavy dark hair and the circular highlight on her belly are what is most distinctive about her appearance. The rather unusual round highlight may designate the woman’s special importance: Picasso especially admired colleagues like Henri Matisse, who, as he put it, carried the sun in their bellies. 

 

As a sort of pictorial wishful thinking, these women appear together in harmony in several works made in 1935, notably the large oil Muse, now at the Musée national de l’art moderne, Centre Pompidou, Paris, showing two women, one clothed, the other nude. What if any specific individuals were on his mind when he painted Deux personnages, it seems that Picasso’s theme of juggling two lovers was not lost on Dora Maar. Soon after meeting Picasso, she made a painting of herself in a face‐off with Walter, The Conversation, 1937, which was a highlight of the retrospective of Maar’s art recently presented at Tate Modern, London. The awkward romantic situation which faced Picasso when he arrived at Royan was similar to his Paris life in the mid‐1930s as Walter vied for his attention with Olga.