“[Picasso] was experiencing an evident pleasure in painting, in exploring every available decorative possibility, […] but Eva was once again the queen of this flowering, which, with a sequence of still lifes dedicated to Ma Jolie and an explosion of color, combines the most intense lyricism and humor. This will later be called Rococo Cubism, a particularly ill-chosen term. It is, in fact, amorous Cubism.”
—Pierre DaixA tender and lyrical portrait first commenced in Avignon circa 1914, Femme en corset lisant un livre documents the pivotal shifts in the visual language of Cubism pursued by Pablo Picasso in the years following the height of the movement’s so-called “Analytic” phase, pioneered by himself and Georges Braque between 1908 and 1912. While this earlier stage of Cubism was characterized by restricted palettes, and a fracturing of solid form and the space surrounding it to enable the simultaneous presentation of multiple perspectives on a single plane, its second "Synthetic” period was announced through the incorporation of color, texture, and the material of everyday life into their compositions. Although the interruption of the First World War and relocation of many artists (including Braque) to the front marked a natural end to the spirit of collaboration and creative exchange that had defined this era, Picasso would carry these lessons forward into his painting during these years as new personal and professional opportunities introduced a more playful note to these later Cubist experiments. 

 

Bold and beautiful, Femme en corset lisant un livre exemplifies the lessons learned from this intensive period of radical experiment in the years before war. The flattened sense of pictorial space, complex compositional arrangement, and playful interactions of color, texture, and pattern are all hallmarks of Picasso’s evolving style in these pivotal years. An intimate and innovative depiction of his muse and lover Eva Gouel, commenced just one year before her untimely death, and returned to in the years following, it also marks a triumphant reappraisal of portraiture that would henceforth come to define the artist’s oeuvre more completely than any other genre. 

 

J’aime Eva…

 

“I love [Eva] very much and I will write this into my paintings.”
–—Pablo Picasso Picasso first met Eva Gouel in 1911, when she was still known as Marcelle Humbert, a confidante of Picasso’s then-partner, Fernande Olivier. Gouel and Picasso quickly embarked on a clandestine romance. Building on the system of signs developed to such a sophisticated level in his Analytical compositions and galvanized by Braque’s introduction of stenciled letters into his work as early as 1911, Picasso encrypted declarations of love to this new muse and mistress in a variety of compositions, most famously in Ma Jolie, 1911-1912, now housed in The Museum of Modern Art in New York. Ostensibly a reference to a popular music hall song, and thus fulfilling Cubism’s public declaration to incorporate the material of everyday life into their compositions, it also operated as a private message to the lover he had nicknamed ma jolie. Other compositions would make even bolder statements. Picasso included the words “J’aime Eva” high on the thigh of the figure in one 1912 piece, whose intersecting transparent planes edged in the very beginnings of brighter color combinations anticipate the more solid rematerializing of form that we see in Femme en corset lisant un livre. 

 

During this earlier stage of their relationship, Picasso had started to make his first, tentative steps towards reintroducing color – a sign perhaps of the artist’s tendency to announce the entrance of a new partner into his life with a change in stylistic direction that would become such a feature of his later work. Although Picasso was the first to introduce everyday materials directly into his compositions with the inclusion of a piece of oil cloth in the 1912, Nature morte à la chaise canée, Musée national Picasso, Paris, Braque’s extension of this into his innovative papier collé experiments would prove vital in this next phase of Cubism’s stylistic evolution. As Picasso wrote excitedly to his friend and rival in October of 1912, "I’ve been using your latest papery and dusty methods,’ highlighting the close conceptual connections made by Picasso at this early stage between the pictorial potential of the flat papiers collés and the tensions that these material elements might generate with passages of more roughly textured paint.ⁱ

 

In what Meyer Schapiro famously termed the "Cubism of Rehabilitation,” during this period, “the figures and objects that had been diced, fragmented, and increasingly displaced in Analytical Cubism were now reincorporated as shaped flat planes forming coherent signs.”ⁱⁱ Combining elements of drawing, collage, painterly imitations of collage, and non-painterly textures such as sand and earth, Synthetic Cubism was absolutely a "synthesis” of the lessons of Analytical Cubism and the introduction of a variety of more diverse technical and stylistic approaches. Most importantly, these experiments allowed Picasso to successfully reintegrate the figure within the distribution of forms perfected in his still lifes. Invigorated by Cubism’s experimental syntax, Picasso returned to the motif of the seated woman—one which would of course come to occupy a major place in his practice—reimagining this motif with "the freedom that came from painting in signs, and that obtained by using fragments of actual objects.”ⁱⁱⁱ

 

Reconquering the portrait

 

As Pierre Daix has suggested, over the course of 1913-1914, Picasso experimented with several different compositional arrangements of the seated woman motif in order to achieve a fully “Synthetic” portrait of Eva. Turning first to the series of studies and final painting of Nude in an Armchair, completed at the very close of 1913, we can see the many different compositional possibilities explored by Picasso, and the central role of collage and construction in refining his approach. In the final painting we can trace the same elegant wave of her long hair and gently parted hairline so tenderly rendered in Femme en corset lisant un livre, while the sculpturally rendered gathering of her silk underskirts in the 1913 work is here simplified and communicated more experimentally through the scalloped sign of the petticoat’s edge. 

 

Picasso would continue these experiments through the winter of 1913-14, celebrating ma jolie across a series of works in which Cubist figuration sat alongside moments of quasi-illusionistic figuration. Returning to Avignon in the summer of 1914, these deeply lyrical canvases would find their ultimate expression in what Daix describes as "one of the most beautiful, joyous, loving, and the freest of his 'synthetic’ Cubist portraits of Eva,” his Portrait de jeune fille, now held in the collection of the Centre Georges Pompidou in Paris, with which Femme en corset lisant un livre sits in direct dialogue.^iv Balanced and harmonious, the internal rhythms of the flattened, intersecting planes endow the painting with a remarkable serenity, echoed in the gentle curve of her downturned eyes and tilted head as she holds the open book lightly in her lap.

 

Elizabeth Cowling has suggested another important source for the newfound flatness of Picasso’s compositions in these years: his papier collé experiments extended with reference to dressmaker patterns, which are “by definition abstract, two-dimensional blueprints for concrete, three-dimensional objects.”^v Given Eva’s own facility with a needle and thread, this perspective adds a touchingly personal note to the scalloped edges of her open déshabillé here, the corset beneath perhaps even anticipating the recurring motif of the dressmaker’s mannequin in certain Surrealist paintings. Given that the work was recorded as completed in 1917-1918 (meaning that Picasso returned to the work in the years following Eva’s death in 1915), it is tempting to read the painting forwards and draw connections between its bold intersections of bright planes of color and the vibrant costume designs that the artist would go on to design for the Ballet Russes in his first production, Parade, staged in 1917. A supreme example of the “joyous and radiant Cubism” that came directly out of Picasso’s papier collé experiments of 1914, Femme en corset lisant un livre underscores Picasso’s restless and vanguard experimentalism in these years, as much as it affirms the role played by collage and construction in pushing the visual language of Cubism to its final, jubilant conclusion. 

 

 

ⁱ Pablo Picasso, quoted in John Richardson, A Life of Picasso, 1907-1917: The Painter of Modern Life, London, 1996, p. 250. 

ⁱⁱ William Rubin, “Reflections on Picasso and Portraiture,” in Picasso and Portraiture: Representation and Transformation, exh. cat., The Museum of Modern Art, New York, 1996, p. 35. 

ⁱⁱⁱ Pierre Daix, Picasso: The Cubist Years 1907-1916, London, 1979, p. 145. 

^iv Daix, “Portraiture in Picasso’s Primitivism and Cubism,” in Picasso and Portraiture: Representation and Transformation, exh. cat., The Museum of Modern Art, New York, 1996, p. 288. 

^v Elizabeth Cowling, “The Fine Art of Cutting: Picasso’s papiers collés and constructions in 1912-14,” Apollo, Nov. 1995, no. 7, p. 16.